In this Bloomberg piece, Amity Schlaes says that every economist has his day and it now seems to be Hayek’s time. She refers to him as the “master of gloom” for his argument that embracing welfare state ideas put a nation on the road to serfdom.
Gloomy, yes — but is Hayek’s analysis realistic? He didn’t say that a country would immediately become a tyranny after adopting some kind of “social safety net,” but rather that doing so would begin a process of increasing politicization that has a self-accelerating tendency. That is, the bigger and more powerful the state becomes, the more social and economic trouble it causes, which in turn leads to still more coercive programs to deal with those problems.
The last two years in the US provide strong evidence in favor of Hayek’s argument, I would say.
