Eighty-two years ago this month, an economist named Friedrich Hayek published a very important book that few people have heard of, and even fewer have actually read.
It's called The Road to Serfdom.
He wrote it during World War II, back when the best and brightest of the Western world had decided the best thing a country could do was let the government run the economy from the top.
Most people who have heard of it assume it's an angry book about evil socialists trying to enslave everybody. It's really not. Hayek actually dedicated it "to the Socialists of All Parties," and he went out of his way to say he didn't think most of these “socialists” were actually bad people. He thought most of them meant well—they wanted to feed people and house people and fix all the unfairness in the world. There is nothing wrong with that! But their methods were what worried Hayek.
They’re what worry me too.
It usually goes something like this: Someone in government decides to implement a program or policy—to plan part of the economy—to help solve some type of social or economic problem. What they fail to recognize is that an economy is just millions of people all acting in their own best interest. That means it’s impossible to ever manage it in any type of top-down way that doesn’t make things better for some and worse for others.
So once you put somebody in charge of deciding who gets what, they run into a wall pretty fast.
And since a plan only works if everybody actually goes along with it, you have to start making them go along with it. Politely at first, then less politely, because a plan you're allowed to ignore isn't really a plan. Every time one rule creates a new mess, they need another rule to clean it up, and on and on, and all the while each step means ceding a little more control of your life over to somebody who's sure they can run it better than you can.
Very rarely (close to never) in human history have people picked tyranny on purpose. They just keep picking the reasonable-sounding things that give government more and more power until one day they look up and don't know where they are.
Hayek had watched this happen for real. He got out of Austria before it went fully dark, and he knew the awful stuff his century produced didn't start out looking awful. It started as good ideas about how to organize everybody for the common good. That's what he was so desperate to convey. Everybody knew what monsters lurked at the end of the road. What most people didn’t (still don’t) know is how reasonable the beginning of the road always looks.
The Road to Serfdom has been foundational in forming my worldview. It has shaped much of the work I do. It describes how people are so often robbed of their freedom and prosperity. It applies to what is still happening now.
The government offers to fix something—to make something better or solve some type of problem. It always sounds like kindness. And to be fair, the people offering it often do actually mean well, which is exactly why they're so hard to argue with. You can get a whole country to unite against a villain. It's a lot harder to unite them against a nice person who just wants to help.
The rising generation is going to get offered this deal their entire lives—give up a little freedom for a little safety, a little independence for a little comfort, a little autonomy for a better society—and it's always going to be presented as being the kind and compassionate position. If the only place they ever run into the other side of that argument is a dense economics book from 1944 (that they will likely never read), they're going to struggle to fight it. And who can blame them, really?
Even if they feel like something is off, they will likely lack the language or the historical framing to give any kind of meaningful rebuttal.
That’s why we wrote The Tuttle Twins and the Road to Surfdom.
We took Hayek's warning—the nice-sounding road that ends somewhere bad—and turned it into a story a seven-year-old will enjoy and understand. In it, Ethan and Emily watch a well-meaning plan slowly wreck the very thing it was supposed to help. Kids who read it walk away with the ability to articulate something most adults can’t: Just because government can fix one problem in the short term doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. What are the second, third, and fourth-order impacts of this so-called fix?
That type of thinking can protect a person (and a nation!) from a lot of bad outcomes.
Our Surfdom isn't a one-off. It's how we've written our whole series of original children’s books. They all take a serious, difficult, grown-up book and make it accessible to a child.
The Tuttle Twins Learn About the Law is Bastiat’s The Law. The Miraculous Pencil is Leonard Read's I, Pencil. The Creature from Jekyll Island borrows its title and theme from G. Edward Griffin’s exposé of the Federal Reserve. Messed Up Market is Mises’s Human Action. These aren't dumbed-down stories with a lesson tacked on at the end; they're the real ideas (the ones it took me years to go find on my own) told well enough that they make a meaningful impact on even the youngest readers.
Because here's what Hayek, Bastiat, Mises, and others were trying to tell us: freedom mostly doesn't get taken by people with cruel and evil intentions. It gets taken by people who mean well but don’t think past their feelings to see where the longer-term outcomes of their good intentions lead. It gets given away by people who generally mean well but don’t know how to think through proposed programs or policies to their natural end.
The best way to ensure a peaceful and prosperous future for all of us is to raise a generation that has grown up with these ideas—a generation of questioners and critical thinkers who know enough about the history of the world and its worst ideas to spot them when they resurface with new branding and new promises.
You can find our whole Children’s Storybooks collection at a massive discount here.
— Connor
