By Noah Dawson
At the city council meeting last week, I spoke about one of the most important books I’ve ever read: Friedrich August von Hayek’s 1944 book “The Road to Serfdom.” In those three short minutes I talked about the book, I mentioned a couple of the warnings brought up by the book which Amarillo should heed, lest we find ourselves down the ‘road to serfdom.’ Over the past week, I’ve continued to think about how the messages in the book apply to our city.
Probably the most important point of the book is that the ‘road to serfdom’ can begin anywhere. At the time of the book being written and published, the second world war was still raging. Nazis ruled in Germany, communist Stalin ruled in Russia, fascists were still clinging to power in Italy, and the Japanese Empire was still standing strong. True evil reigned in much of the world, but the seeds that brought such evil weren’t exclusive to the places where evil reinged. As Hayek wrote, “The tendencies which have culminated in the creation of the totalitarian systems were not confined to the countries which have succumbed to them.” He also elaborated that “The history of these countries in the years before the rise of the totalitarian system showed few features with which we are not familiar.”
Though we’ve made much progress since the end of the second world war, many places around the earth and within our nation continue to have problems with overbearing government. Here in the United States, though authoritarianism as horrid as Nazi Germany or Communist Russia does not hold power, many larger cities have grown large governments, forcing the cost of living up and individual liberty down. Still, these places where government has grown all have one thing in common, something which is self evident given the phrase “government has grown.” In the past, every one of these cities once had less government and more freedom.
Here in Amarillo, we pride ourselves on having relatively low taxes and a historically responsible local government. None of that, though, is guaranteed. I often hear the city council and city manager defend going into debt by pointing to our bond ratings. What seems to be missing from the logic though is the reason we have good bond ratings; we have historically had responsible government. Today, though, our city government is growing. It’s moves like this, where the relaxed nature of the past allows foolish detours away from responsibility, that have led to the problems faced by so many other places.
While one of the major points of the book is that freedom isn’t inevitable, another point is that growing government isn’t inevitable either. In fact, while those who find themselves on the ‘road to serfdom’ often have good intentions, it’s the results that matter. The results we should aim for are ones which protect freedom, not ones which dissolve it. This overarching goal is easily ignored when working on smaller goals. Maybe it will be fun to have a baseball stadium downtown. Maybe it will be a small boost to the local economy. (Side note: it won’t be a boost to the economy, just ask an economist.) Is it worth the price of chaining our citizens and future generations to the debt it puts us in? To me, my liberty is more important than baseball. Still, it is often implied that we have no choice. We are a growing city, and most cities larger than us have larger governments. They have higher taxes, they have stadiums, and they spend much more than we do. In fact, a smaller version of this logic recently tried to take hold in Canyon, where they worried that as they grew, they would need to proactively follow Amarillo’s lead by considering a camping ordinance.
As Mussolini put it, “The more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become.” This idea, Hayek wrote, is “devoid of foundation.” In fact, history and economics have proven that societies are often most successful when allowed to grow freely. In other works, Hayek has been a champion of the idea of “spontaneous order.” Even more famously, Adam Smith wrote about how the “invisible hand” of the market could move society forward.
Hayek wrote about these points and others at length in The Road to Serfdom, but I think no quote better captures the message of the book than what Ronald Reagan said in 1961, when he said “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”
Still, the road we are on is not a one way street. We can turn around. I don’t know if there is any hope left that our current council or city manager have any intention of turning us around, so we the people must stand up. We the people must take our city back. We the people must turn our city around.
