America's Return to a Road to Serfdom? by Richard M. Ebeling

Under the cover of one of the most severe economic crisis in the post-World War II period, the United States is witnessing the largest and most dramatic increase in the size and scope of government power since the 1930s and 1940s.

We are dangerously returning to “the road to serfdom” that free market, Austrian economist and Nobel Laureate, Friedrich A. Hayek, warned about in a book with that title that was originally published in 1944. A spider’s web of regulations, controls, and commands were imposed on the free enterprise system at that time, first under the crisis conditions of the Great Depression and then expanded in Great Britain and the United States during the emergency years of the Second World War.

Hayek feared that with this growth in government control over the economic affairs of the nation, individual freedom was being seriously threatened. He argued that with government commands over production, pricing, and resource use there inevitably came government control over peoples’ lives.