Although Hayek’s was pimped as an economic treatise, it is really a far-right political tract, Declan Hayes writes.

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Combining the insights of The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek‘s classic treatise that Margaret Thatcher so admired with the dynamic experiences of recent applied American economics gives us the necessary compass to see that the great United States of America itself is very much on the road to serfdom, or worse.

Hayek’s basic thesis was that allowing the government to control the economy, its commanding heights in particular, was the road to perpetual bondage and it is little wonder that Thatcher used his screed to smash the miners and Reagan used it to deregulate even such things as advertising to children. If you wonder why GI Joe and similar dolls became the favourite toys for boys, and why we get so many pre-pubescent boys and girls leading today’s endless LGBT parades, the bread crumbs lead right back to the deregulation era of Thatcher and Reagan and the rantings of Hayek, which justified them.

Although Hayek’s was pimped as an economic treatise, it is really a far-right political tract, as it was big on ideology and very small on micro economic policy innovations. Hayek’s basic line was that the government did not belong in the economy, which should follow the Flying Dutchman‘s ephemeral sails of American-style freedom and liberty.

In defence of Hayek, his screed was gestated during the rise of Hitler, the New Deal and Mussolini, and published in 1944 when, because of the War, governments were very much at the centre of all economies, which were geared for all-out war and where there was no room for his idle, idyllic speculations and navel gazings. Coupled with that, and with memories of the global right-wing post Great War surge very much in policy makers’ minds, Victory in Europe Day was followed by a need to give the West’s ordinary families a piece of the spoils of war for themselves, a sort of updated version of Scarlett O’Hara’s forty acres and a mule, if you will.

The period from 1945 to 1973 were the West’s golden years, when living standards in the United States and its various satellites continued to improve until the 1973 oil crisis removed the economic certainty on which that progress was built and the Keynesian Big Brother economics which ideologically underwrote it all. One result of that oil bump was the rise of Hayek’s libertarianism and the awful punishment the people of Chile suffered following the 1973 coup the CIA and their Hayek-inspired Chicago economists orchestrated there.

Although the Chileans were the first to be squeezed to their pips, they were not the last and such things as the extirpation of trade union power, of the sense of Catholic solidarity in Latin America, as well as the moves to instant gratification amongst Americans and their Western clones have allowed a horrible caricature of Hayek’s belief to conquer the Western policy makers’ mind set.

Take the high paying jobs of North Carolina’s furniture industry, which Trump promised to bring back to America from China. But, although North Carolina’s woods and rail connections make it ideally placed to dominate the furniture industry, Ikea’s flat packing and the demand for fast, tacky furniture has given China an insurmountable advantage and that cannot change until Americans are prepared to change their preferences to high-priced furniture that will last for generations and that, for most people, can only be bought by instalments over many years.

But, far from regarding furniture as an investment to be paid for by instalments, Americans are now even buying fast food by instalments. Instead of just frying themselves an egg and slapping it on a crust of bread with a dollop of lard to flavour it, Americans are buying hot dogs and burritos on credit and paying the exorbitant interest rates that go with them. Fast food, like fast furniture, fast farming (which we will come to later) and fast fashion are all paid for by fast money and all of them are combining to leave Americans flat out of cash and helping to ensure that America is fast becoming an economic basket case.

Not only is Klarna cleaning up from Americans buying their hot dogs on the never-never but outfits like Uber and DoorDash have not only made outrageous fortunes by cornering the food delivery and taxi markets but have squeezed producers, providers and customers alike in America’s mad dash for instant convenience and instant gratification.

No matter whether we are looking at home deliveries, private prisons, one way tickets to El Salvadorean gulags, or ticket gouging for big concerts and sports events, we see a recurring pattern of deregulation, aggressive consolidation that wipes out the small guy, the systematic flouting of antitrust laws, syndicated data and algorithmic price rigging. Add to that fast farming, which consists of Cargill, Tyson and America’s other giant food producers cornering the food market and outfits like John Deere keeping control through software tethering and the proprietary licencing of the software and spare parts of the very expensive machinery they sell to farmers and America, to repeat, is fast becoming an economic basket case.

Not all of America of course, but all those apple pie eating trailer trash Americans that hypocrite Bruce Springsteen sang about in Born in the USA who, before being shipped off to Khe Sanh to “kill the yellow man” grew up in affordable manufactured homes, the so called trailer parks, which were America’s last affordable housing projects and which are now being bought up wholesale by vulture funds, who are price gouging those who live there.

Down in Florida, meanwhile, it will soon be illegal to anchor your boat for longer than a few days without a permit and marinas are already banned from allowing live-aboard boaters to rent dock slips or mooring balls. So, unless you own land, or rent from someone that does own land, Florida is abolishing the right to live for everyone else. They have already made it illegal to park an RV and live in it without a camping spot and you can’t even sleep in your car or camp anywhere unless you pay for a spot, and you can’t sleep under a bridge or on a park bench without being arrested.

It will be a misdemeanor offence for any boater to anchor their boat for longer than a few days without a permit. It will be a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison for a second offence and it will be a felony, punishable by up to a whopping 15 years in prison for third and subsequent offences. About two million Yanks will have to haul anchor as a result of all these efforts to make America great for the oligarchs again.

Despite all of that, America is still the greatest country in the world, if you are an amoral billionaire with the moral conscience of a saltwater crocodile, who can shape the political eco system to your own insatiable needs. Here, for example, is Donald Trump praising predatory fund managers for shorting stocks during his April 2025 tariffs kerfuffle with China. Forget the Trump-Musk spat and forget Elon Musk too as they are just two of the predatory salties who prowl the swampscape of corporate America.

And, as North Carolina’s furniture industry shows, forget all their empty promises to make America great again for, when taken as the members of a bask (or float, which is the collective name for a group) of saltwater crocodiles, their game is to shape America for their own needs, not for those Bruce Springsteen, U2 or any other corporate minstrels cry crocodile tears about.

Although Starlink and Musk’s other initiatives have led to some high paying jobs, more often than not, they lead to massive eco destruction and the loss of all other forms of employment. Brownsville, an impoverished Texan town, where Musk based his SpaceX scam, exemplifies as he has burdened the locals with all the exterior costs while he has helped himself to all the benefits.

Although Hayek might have lauded Trump’s Brownsville as an example of private initiative thriving under the banner of freedom, liberty and apple pie, Musk is simply doing what all other American billionaires do, which is to take the lion’s share for themselves and to dump all the downsides on the unorganised ordinary people, who lack any means to counter them. In the dog eat dog world that is corporate America, the big shots tear the ordinary people apart for breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper too. If there are any important exceptions to this in modern day America, I am unaware of them.

Although China is posited as a major cause of America’s decline, there is little that can be done about that as China and similar countries will always be able to undercut America in terms of salaries, and tariffs and other gimmicks will not stem the endless supply of fast furniture, fast fashion and similar Asian junk until American tastes change and American consumers have the financial means to change their entire lifestyles. I can’t see any of that happening in my lifetime. And nor can I see America winning the hi tech game or regaining control of steel and other components of the commanding heights for much the same reasons that Britannia had to accept her own terminal decline.

Although most major steel companies are now Asian, even those like ArcelorMittal, which are nominally European are, for all intents and purposes, Asian and, given that most future growth will be in Asia, it is difficult to see how America can be a core part of that or any of the world’s most critical industries. Although the Trump regime has made very significant progress in strong arming Taiwanese firms to set up shop in the United States, China just seems to be on an unstoppable roll.

Although America could, theoretically at least, stop that advance, that is infinitely harder when the United States is just the plaything of its oligarchs and when those they displace and marginalise have no real say in the system outside of being MAGA hat wearing extras in Trump’s rallies once every four years.

As long as the Kochs crucify farmers with their fertiliser prices, as long as Sam Altman can sell his heaven on earth through AI shackles mantra, as long as Mark Zuckerberg can dump the costs and externalities of his mega data centres on the ordinary Joe, Hayek’s big government/oligarch thesis will continue to hold water and Americans can forget about coming to close quarters with China or any other similar heavyweight. This is because most Americans, bar the junkies of Kensington Avenue and Skid Row, have no interest in being perpetually happy lemmings who own nothing, not even the right to a dignified life before they tumble off the cliffs into a life of penury below.

When Trump and the oligarchs’ other Republican puppets say they are going to lower taxes, or when their Punch and Judy Democrat opponents promise to raise them, it is not to clean up such messes or to get John Deere off the back of American farmers. Rather, it is to perpetuate the power of the oligarchs and those, like the U.S. military, who project the oligarchs’ interests overseas.

Though Klarna, Uber and Doordash will not make America great again, getting rid of them and a million other predatory companies like them are necessary precursors to Americans’ road to salvation but only if they switch off their TV sets and whatever other mediums are used to brainwash them. But, because the brainwashing has been so pervasive, I think it is too late even for that or to spend more time on Hayek, who was probably less of a prophet than MI6 spy George Orwell was when he wrote in 1984 that “So long as they (we, the plebs) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern…Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”

Whatever about the rest of Orwell’s pronouncements, gambling, in particular, parlay, DraftKings‘ and FanDuel‘s credit default swaps of e-gambling, have stacked the odds against the young men who get fast tracked into that losers’ road to serfdom.

From one MI6 agent, let us go to another, to chapter one of Marx’s Communist Manifesto which kicks off as follows: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations”.

Although Marx’s historical thesis is not without some small merit, I can’t for the life of me see where that struggle is reflected in today’s American government, which is simply a crass enterprise being run, to coin Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, “of the oligarchs, by the oligarchs, for the oligarchs”.

If we accept that updated definition, which is roughly in accord with the pronouncements of Hayek, Marx, Orwell and Eisenhower, then the question is what, if anything, can we do about it outside of vainly hoping these predatory oligarchs will leave us and ours alone. A curved ball question that will not be answered without much pain and loss of life, but the answer, to me at least, is antithetical to the varying solutions any of those four jokers offered. Only a massive defeat along the lines Germany and Japan suffered in 1945 and a total emasculation of America’s equivalent of Hitler’s Krupps, Quandts, Flicks, von Fincks, Porsche-Piëchs and Oetkers will suffice and that won’t happen by hugging trees and singing Hare Krishna to whatever wildlife we are disturbing in the branches above us.

Because the American political deck is totally stacked in favour of the oligarchs, salvation, if it can come at all, cannot come from within the current system. That said, to save the Americans from themselves, the Chinese should pull the plug on the American system to see which, if any Americans, can survive the ensuing chaos which, if anything else, would rescue the Yanks from the perpetual serfdom the oligarchs’ pied pipers continue to lure them ever deeper into.

Although Marx, Engels, Orwell and Hayek all lived in interesting times that none of us want to revisit, unless we organise and fund ourselves appropriately, the road to serfdom at the hands of the oligarchs and their political appointees awaits because, as the oligarchs and their toadies have those means of salvation firmly blocked, there seems to be no other road than that of Orwell’s dystopian servitude awaiting us all. Incomplete though this analysis may be, try preaching any of it and see how long you last before you are fast tracked to El Salvador’s for profit prisons because you were not in line with Trump’s rethreaded tropes of Hayek’s concepts of freedom and liberty, o Liberté, que de crimes on commet en ton nom!