EXCERPTS:
"Mr. Hayek’s book is no beach read. Rather, it’s dense polemic against socialism that argues that centralized planning by the government will inevitably lead to an oppressive state. Mr. Hayek wrote it while living in England in the early 1940s out of concern that a shift toward collectivism there would give rise to something akin to Nazism.
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A member of the so-called Austrian school of economics, Mr. Hayek believed that the economy was simply too complex for the government to attempt to manage its ups and downs. He argued that economist John Maynard Keynes’s recommendation that government spend money to allay an economic downturn could actually make the downturn worse, as well as lead to an inflation problem later.
... Late last year George Mason University economist Russell Roberts helped put together a rap video that pitted Mr. Keynes against Mr. Hayek that so far has garnered over a million hits on YouTube.... Mr. Roberts, a libertarian who runs the economics blog Café Hayek with colleague Donald Boudreaux, says he’s encourage by the renewed interest in Mr. Hayek.
“There’s been very large growth in government and very large growth in the deficit – it’s alarming,” he says. “I don’t know if we’re on the road to serfdom but we may be on the road to Greece, which is scary enough.”
Among most academic economists, however, Mr. Hayek’s ideas about how economy responds to government intervention have held little sway. His major contribution to the field has been the idea that prices convey crucial information about supply and demand, and that government attempts to manage prices – like the price controls put in place by the Soviet Union and its satellites – lead to the overproduction of some items, while others end up in short supply.
The rush of orders [for Hayek's book] caught Hayek publisher The University of Chicago Press short of copies.... He anticipates that as many as 120,000 copies of the Road to Serfdom will be sold this year, up from about 27,000 last year, and 7000 to 8000 a year before the financial crisis struck in fall 2008.
