In the course of shilling for coal and oil industry types against those who believe that the negative externalities associated with carbon dioxide emissions should be curtailed via pricing, Heritage’s Nick Loris explains:
Second, the only thing a green ‘New Deal’ will do is lead us down a Green Road to Serfdom. (Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is a telling portrayal of what collectivism in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany can lead to: impoverishment and oppression of freedom.)
You’d think conservatives would at least have a better grasp of what their own books are about. But The Road to Serfdom is not primarily a portrayal of oppression in the totalitarian states. It is, rather, an argument that Western Europe’s postwar mixed-economy democracies were on a slippery slope (i.e., “road”) to Soviet-style totalitarianism (i.e., “to serfdom”). And I suppose it’s true that by the same logic that says the creation of the National Health Service in the UK would lead inevitably to the Gulag, you might as well say the same about a cap and trade program. But that logic is wrong.
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