The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons

Here's a comic book pamphlet adaptation of Nobel prize winning economist Friedrich A. Hayek's 1947 anti-collectivism book The Road to Serfdom. It was originally published in Look magazine in the early 1950s. Link (Thanks, Ivan!)

[#1 posted by joe blough , September 18, 2007 11:32 AM]

wha? is that a butt-trumpet over there on the right? seems fitting.

[#2 posted by noen , September 18, 2007 12:28 PM]

LOL It says "The World is Flat". I didn't know that "give it six more months" Thomas Friedman was around back then.

;)

[#3 posted by dougrogers , September 18, 2007 1:54 PM]

Deeply ironic in light of present politics.

[#4 posted by phasor3000 , September 18, 2007 2:08 PM]

Also deeply ironic in light of present culture.

[#5 posted by zuzu , September 18, 2007 2:30 PM]

This has been hosted on the Ludwig von Mises Institute website (mises.org) for years. I'm surprised it took until now for BoingBoing to post about it.

Friedrich von Hayek was amazing for grounding economics in epistemology rather than progressive/modernist ideology. I highly recommend reading The Use of Knowledge in Society by him (it's short, but so also a bit terse).

http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Economics/HayekUseOfKnowledge.html

"Distrust those in whom the desire to punish is strong." -- Nietzsche / Goethe / Dostoevsky

[#6 posted by Anonymous , September 18, 2007 7:34 PM]

Doug Rogers and Phasor3000,

How is this cartoon ironic, in light of present politics and culture?

It might be slightly different than the modern situation (Hayek wrote it based on the idea of WWII total war conflicts vs. modern limited warfare), but the same power politics seem to apply: Warfare requires central planning, central planning requires increased centralized authority and policing and a charasmatic leader to sell the plan, and that leads to fascism and authoritarianism.

It seems highly relevant and hardly ironic. Do people know what 'ironic' means? It would be 'ironic' if Hayek turned out to be G.W. Bush's grandfather. Or if G.W. Bush was an anarchist instead of an authoritarian. But it isn't ironic as is.

[#7 posted by Anonymous , September 18, 2007 9:20 PM]

Excuse the pedantry, but there is no such thing as a Nobel Prize for Economics and, consequently, no such thing as a Nobel Prize winninng economist, unless we mean an economist who won a Nobel Prize for something else like Chemistry or Literature.

Excuse the troll: nor should there be.

RobW

[#8 posted by burbleboy , August 26, 2008 2:06 PM]

RobW,
I think the various people who have been Nobel Laureates in Economics, such as Hayek, Friedman and many others going back to 1969 would be surprised to learn that there is no Nobel prize in Economics. Even a cursary search would have led you to
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/
Do your research.