The 'Road to Serfdom' by Austrian economist and political essayist F. A. Hayek was first penned in the 1940s at the height of a war for freedom and civilisation – one which in part pitted the individualist, legal bounded and rights oriented Anglo-Saxon powers against Nazism. Hayek's masterpiece is timeless because he lays out the case against collectivist and socialist ideas – a case which will never be outdated since his perceptions and conclusions are ineluctably associated with the logical outcomes of communal ideologies taking over society. In yet another age of strong man rule and immature yelps for prophets in the guise of people such as Obama [or Prophet Obamed], Hayek's work should be re-read and re-learnt.

As Hayek proves, Nazism is of course first and foremost a socialist project. This bears repeating since fascism in the modern world is equated with conservatism. The socialists have spent 70 years, abetted by the fanatical propaganda of Russian imperialism before 1991, in convincing the average person that Hitlerism and Nazism are derived from capitalist and conservative forces. The reality was and is the converse. Nazism is a socialist ideology – one based on the volk, or communal power of a people dedicated only to state power and glory.

National Socialism by its very definition and implementation is against the individual, against markets; against foreign exchange; militarist; pagan, communal and irrationally mystical. It shares nothing whatsoever in common with conservative ideas and orthodox liberal ideas including rights, laissez-faire economics and the rule of contracts and laws, and the Western inspired rationality of the Enlightenment.

Hayek knew all of this. The rush in the modern world to all things statist or government controlled, is remarkable by its sheer ignorance and pathetic belief – mystical – in the benignity and efficacy, not to mention efficiency, of state institutions. The current 'ethos' resembles that of the 1930s. Government's created the Great Depression and the call by the media and supposedly the unwashed, dirty-faced 'masses' was for strong man rule in the guise of an FDR, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, or sundry other lesser known strutting egos.

Today the hue and cry is the same – the media and the chattering mass for example glorifying Prophet Obamed – a man who has never worked in the private sector, who sat in a racist church for 25 years, who handed out mortgages to poor blacks and whites in Chicago and whose left wing extremism has been well known by any who bother to view his voting records for 10 years.

Yet such a figure – who is not white of course – is declared to be the savior, the 'one', and the acrobat who will use magic water to heal not only America's, but indeed the world's and mother earth's wounds! To say that such an attitude is immature and blind is only being diplomatic. Much more accurate words could be used to describe such a cultish set of ideological nonsense but they would offend the 'rights' of the thin-skinned intolerant's who possess them.

So what warnings can one find in Hayek's masterpiece ? The following applied in 1944, and even more so today – since government now owns more of GDP and controls even the minutest of individual actions and attitudes:

-p. 16
“Although we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by De Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism....it scarely occurs to us that the two things may be connected.”

-p. 17
“...Western civilisation as it has grown from the foundations laid by Christianity and the Greeks and Romans. Not merely nineteenth-and eighteenth century liberalism, but the basic individualism inherited by us from Erasmus and Montaigne, from Cicero and Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides, is progressively relinquished.”

And in a world where government policies, lack of oversight, and addiction to spending and artificially inflating land values, has led to an economic collapse:

“Individualism has a bad name today, and the term has come to be connected with egotism and selfishness.”

The zeitgeist today is authoritarian-communal. Given the failure of this orientalist approach to social organisation it is rather disturbing that the popular current and trend is towards ever more government. As Hayek writes, the Western based, and Western-only, revolt by the individual against the collective, against the state, against centralised control, created the modern world. It is the prime force which created modern civilisation. That is a fact.

Of course the growth of the modern world is not perfect, nor is it without its own catalogue of follies, crimes, scams, and blind spots. But so what. No process, no ideology, no race, no tribe, no state, no pagan organisation, anywhere in history, anywhere on this planet can claim the opposite.

Hayek's lessons are numerous, but we can end a first glance into the 'Road to Serfdom' with this quote – so apt in the ridiculous pop – culture circus of cultural Marxist relativism and the collectivization of much of economic and political life. Indeed as the economy goes, so goes freedom:

“It is rarely remembered now that socialism in its beginnings was frankly authoritarian. The French writers who laid the foundations of modern socialism had no doubt that their ideas could be put into practice only by strong dictatorial government. To them socialism mean an attempt to 'terminate the revolution' by a deliberate re-organisation of society on hierarchical lines and by the imposition of a coercive 'spiritual power'.”

'Terminate the revolution' - meaning of course the revolution of the Enlightenment and of rationality, free markets, individualism and indeed individual responsibility and hope. Terminate it with collectivism, and with a Nazi-styled program of volk power, communal spirit and socialised risk and responsibility. We see this nonsensical approach today with the EU; the 'Prophet Obamed'; and the ineluctable rise of government power controlling all aspects of life from the economy, to the environment, to education and the media. It is the road to slavery and destitution.