Socialism Leads to Totalitarianism?

If you haven’t noticed already, I have a strong interest in political philosophy. Isn’t thinking about the different ways government could be designed exciting? This is primarily a health policy blog, but political philosophy topics are closely enough related to what happens in healthcare that I write about them here as well.

I recently read (listened to) The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek. The interesting thing is that he seemed to be using my framework for categorizing governments. So I’d like to restate his main points in the context of my framework.

The book was written during WWII and published in 1944. At that time, he was living in the U.K., and he was seeing a movement there toward central planning, so he wrote this book to explain to the people involved in that movement how central planning starts a country down a road that leads to totalitarianism. He used Germany’s then-recent political history as the main case study to show how that process goes.

Let’s say the U.K.’s government looked something like this at that time:

And the “planners,” as Hayek calls them, wanted to do this:

There were different motivations for this. One was that, at the time, technology was seen as necessarily pushing industries toward monopolies, so they felt that government ownership would limit the tyrannies of monopolies. Another motivation that developed is a change in how freedom was conceptualized. “Before man could be truly free,” they said, “the despotism of physical want has to be broken.”

Notice that these are not totalitarian desires; they are desires for efficiency and an increase in freedom and opportunity for the poor. So how does Hayek say they lead to big leftward shifts on the other three spectra?

He doesn’t exactly provide a super explicit stepwise process, but here are some of his major checkpoints along that road:

• Planning a society will involve areas with great agreement, but there will also be areas with great disagreement. In those areas of disagreement, people lose the freedom to conserve their preferences.
• If a state owns half the economy, it necessarily controls most of the other half indirectly due to the interactions between industries, such as through shared inputs to those industries (like labor and resources). This means there is no part of society where people are completely free of government direction.
• After a democracy votes in a planning government, they find that the democratic process is ill equipped to handle the plan’s requirement for rapid and unified-purpose decision making, so different parts are working at odds with the overall plan or are slow to change to fit better. For this reason, the laws they pass increasingly delegate decision-making power to unelected experts. Eventually, their legislative power becomes limited to making decisions about the plan’s overall goals, although in this area as well they find themselves inadequate because frequent shifts in goals (due to differences in factions’ priorities and politician turnover with each election cycle) undermine progress toward any ideal. Thus, they begin to concentrate the power to direct the overall goals (and coordinate the efforts of those many boards of experts) into a single individual who is not fettered by democratic and legislative processes.
• This new powerful leader is occasionally confirmed via the democratic process, but the leader has the power to ensure, one way or another, that the votes go in his direction so he can continue working toward the ideal society.
• A planned economy becomes the rule of man because so many of the decisions about people’s lives become arbitrary (whose interests to prioritize over whose). For example, do you increase wages of the working poor who are struggling to get by or do you decrease unemployment?
• A planning government only sets out to control and improve the economic aspect of people’s lives, but by controlling the economic aspect they are indirectly controlling nearly every other aspect, such as where people live (you can’t move somewhere else if the government hasn’t decided there will be jobs available in that area) and what you do for fun (which luxury items and entertainment options are available and how they are priced).
• People are dissatisfied when they are made to go along with another’s set of priorities and values, so the government creates indoctrination tools that will reduce the number of people resisting their goal for an ideal society.
• The whole apparatus of information, including schools and print and audio and visual media, will be used not only in supporting the ends but also the means to achieve the ideal society, and speaking out against it becomes not just an opinion but treachery.
• The leaders who tend to arise in such a system are those who are the strongest and most motivated to get things done, which means they are the most likely to be willing to ignore negative impacts on other people in pursuit of their singular focus (the means justify the ends).

So this is where the U.K. could have ended up if the planners had gotten their way, and remember this would all come from the planners’ initial desires to have the government help out with inefficient industries and to reduce the despotism of poverty:

There are so many other points made in the book that flesh out these ideas more fully, but I will forbear. Suffice it to say that end point of the the road is not just totalitarianism, but serfdom, which is due to the increasingly impossible task of a government trying to control an entire economy and, in the process, distorting every single worker’s incentives away from efficiency and innovation and redirecting resources away from their most profitable uses.

Reading this was quite an interesting experience because, with every point Hayek made, I could visualize which spectrum he was talking about and interpret his explanations in terms of which direction (and how far) a country would slide along that spectrum.

And the question it left me with is this: If Democrats’ policies tend to push toward more wealth redistribution and more government control over industries (e.g., Medicare for All), does this mean electing Democrats puts us on the road to serfdom?

My thought is that it doesn’t. Pushing for Medicare for All is not the same as endorsing a planned economy. One could argue that it’s one step closer to getting us on that road, but we have seen “social democracies” in Scandinavia not progress toward totalitarianism, so maybe that slope isn’t as slippery as Hayek makes it out to be. Exactly which factors would also need to be at play for us to truly get onto the road to serfdom? I don’t know. Any thoughts or ideas are welcome.