When Glenn Beck urged his listeners, “Please, pick it up. The Road to Serfdom. Make it part of your essential library,” sales of Austrian Economist Frederick von Hayek’s book at Amazon.com pushed it to Number 1 the next day. Prior to the election of President Obama, “The book sold respectably at a clip of about 600 copies a month,” according to Bruce Caldwell, editor at the University of Chicago Press. “But then, in November 2008, sales more than quadrupled, and they haven’t slowed down since.”
When John Stossel, host of Fox Business, featured the book on his show on February 21, sales jumped again.
Opinions as to the remarkable interest in a book published in 1944 by an obscure economist vary, but most center on the book’s uncanny prediction that is now being fulfilled in the United States: centralized and expanding government and its increasingly obvious tyranny impacting citizens’ lives on a daily basis.
Caldwell said the book provides “arguments about the dangers of the unbridled growth of government … including the characterization of the health care debate as being about socialized medicine…. [The book] taps into a profound dissatisfaction in the public mind with the machinations of its government. Furthermore,” he says, “a recurrent theme in the news is that, in contrast to the millions who are suffering, the politically connected are doing just fine.”
Professor Thomas Woods, senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, who was Beck’s guest, said that Hayek was “warning about … people [who] think that there is a way to centrally-plan an economy, or run a society … that doesn’t involve methods that we would find utterly distasteful and barbaric.”
