"Now, [Friedrich] Hayek was best known during his lifetime as a lonely critic of socialism and central planning. In the 1940s, when his fellow economists were enthusiastically nationalizing industries and expecting the Soviet Union to soon overtake the West economically, he published an unlikely bestseller titled The Road to Serfdom. In that, he predicted that the central planners were doomed to fail because of overconfidence in their own knowledge, in their own expertise. He called this the fatal conceit. It was the title of a later book, too. Now, this idea was not very popular among Western intellectuals, but his ideas were an enduring inspiration to reformers trapped behind the iron curtain, until communism finally collapsed in 1989.
By then Hayek was 90 years old and he didn't issue any public statements. But his son reported that as the family sat at home watching television, watching the fall of the Berlin Wall on TV, Hayek could not resist smiling and saying, "I told you so." Now, during those heady years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, many of us, and myself included, expected freedom to keep spreading around the world. There was talk of the end of history now that liberal democracy and free markets and enlightenment values had prevailed. For a while, freedom did spread. But lately, as we've seen, it's in retreat. Both abroad, most obviously in China and Russia, but also here at home. Young Americans are suddenly embracing socialism. Academics and journalists are demanding censorship. Both political parties have turned protectionist. Public officials have claimed unprecedented powers to suspend fundamental liberties. And that traditional guarantee of equal justice for all is giving way to something called social justice."
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