Bryan Caplan on Hayek, Richter, and Socialism

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 28 June 2010

⏱️ 69 minutes

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Summary

Bryan Caplan of George Mason University and blogger at EconLog talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about two books: Eugene Richter's Pictures of the Socialistic Future and F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. Both books warn against the dangers of socialism. Pictures of a Socialistic Future, published in 1891 is a dystopian novel imagining what life would be like after a socialist revolution. The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, explores the links between economic freedom and political freedom and the inherent similarities between communism and fascism. Both books look at the German roots of centralized planning and the nature of the people who rise to power when the State is powerful. The conversation includes discussion of the these topics as well as the rule of law and the amount of state control of the economy in Nazi Germany.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you.
0:38.6	My guest today is Brian Kaplan of George Mason University. He blogs at econlog, part of
0:43.8	the Library of Economics and Liberty. Brian, welcome back to econtalk.
0:47.5	Thanks so much for having me, Russ.
0:49.4	Brian, you approached me recently about doing a podcast on two books that are slightly
0:53.3	older than our usual choices. The first book you recommended is Pictures of the Socialistic
0:59.5	Future by Eugene Richter, a book that was written in 1893. It's a dystopian novel, that
1:06.2	is it is a not the opposite of a utopian novel. It paints a picture of a very unpleasant
1:12.2	future that would occur in the author's mind under socialism. And the second book,
1:18.7	a slightly more well-known, The Road to Serfdom, by F.A. Hayek in the news recently and
1:24.7	today, is June 22, 2010. So that's what our recording date.
1:38.4	Let's start with talking about Pictures of the Socialistic Future by Eugene Richter. It's
1:43.5	a dystopian novel. It paints, as I said, a very bleak and macabre picture, but it does
1:49.4	it in a humorous, almost humorous and ironic way. So tell me about how you found out about
1:54.8	that book and your thoughts on it.
1:57.9	Right. So I heard about this book, maybe 20 years ago, I believe, from Ralph Raco, who's
2:02.3	an historian at Sunni Buffalo. And what he did, he just mentioned that there was this
2:07.5	book where written long before the Berlin Wall, where some guy foretold that eventually
	...

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