Executive Privilege: Presidential Power, Secrecy, and Accountability Book

The New Road to Serfdom by Daniel Hannan

You might recall this conservative member of the European Parliament for his outspoken criticism of Obama-Care in the months before the bill passed. Hannan warned the US that it would be foolish to throw away its health care system to follow the example of Britain, where the NHS has resulted in some of the worst care (not to mention avoidable death) in the western world.

We didn't listen. So Hannan is back with a book that has little in common with the original Road to Serfdom by Frederick Hayek except this: They both represent a warning to the United States, or indeed any country who is following the road that we are. And that is the road to greater and greater central control. It is a road to serfdom.

Hannan looks at the sorry and declining state of European political organization and compares it to the genius of the American system and asks this central question: Why on earth would America want to follow Europe's example?

He says, I have been a Member of the European Parliament for eleven years. I am living your future. Let me tell you a few things about it.

What he tells us is not good. And it starts with a startling and enlightening fact: The US Constitution, with all its amendments is 7,200 words long, The EU Constitution, now formally known as the Lisbon Treaty, is 76,000.

Daniel Hannan begins his book by noting the Europe, at one time a world backwater, became a world power precisely because its states were forced to compete in a race to the top. He says, The richness of European civilization has always resided in its diversity, its pluralism, its variety. Yet, comparing the political structures of the United States and the EU, we see that those values, exported across the Atlantic centuries ago, are thriving better in the new home than on their native soil.

And further:

Europe's success resided in the fact that it never became a unified state, but rather remained a states system. This lack of a strong central authority encouraged a culture of enterprise and adventure, of exploration and mercantilism.

Predating and predicting US success with its system of Federalism, Hannan asserts, Many European advances were driven by the 'phenomenon of the refugee'. As long as there was somewhere to flee to, the power of the autocrat was checked. As long as there were competing states, no dictatorship could be secure.

But this dispersal of power or "systems competition" which first propelled Europe has been replaced with a type of European centralization that is leading the Continent to decline. Says Hannan, This is a phenomenon that political scientists call "systems competition"…. The EU is a depressing example of what the United States might turn into: A federation that is prepared to sacrifice prosperity for the sake of uniformity.

US federalism and its dispersal of power was chiefly designed to prevent the growth of a dictatorial central state… The founders understood that large administrations would become prey to vested interests and that the law of dispersed costs and concentrated gains would make big government expensive, inefficient and nepotistic.

So what happened? What has caused increasing centralization in the US? Hannan explores a number of historical events…. Theodore Roosevelt's widespread use of executive decrees, the 16th amendment, of which he says,
was the first of a new set of measures aimed at strengthening the national government. It allowed Congress to make conditional grants to states in return for their discharge of particular policies. Form then on, states often found themselves acting simply as the local administrators of a national policy. The 17 Amendment, and the New Deal, about which its leaders he says,
The New Deal Democrats, like many elected representatives today, were in the grip of one of the most dangerous of political fallacies: the idea that at a time of crisis, the government's response must be proportionate to the degree of public anxiety. "Doing nothing is not an option!"….. but doing nothing is always an option, and often the best option.

Continuing with this dangerous fallacy, Obama's policies continue the New Deal mentality. Of Obama's policies, Hannan says that they: amount to a sustained project of Europeanization: state health care, government day care, universal college education, carbon taxes, support for supra-nationalism, bigger government, a softer foreign policy.

While the growth of big government gives power and benefits to certain politicians, it represses the economy and represents a moral hazard. Hannon states: The expansion of the state doesn't just reduce economic growth. More damagingly, it tends to squeeze out personal morality. As taxes rise, charitable donations fall. As social workers become responsible for vulnerable citizens, their neighbors no longer look out for them.

The New Road to Serfdom is a bracing warning from a foreign politician who has, he says, seen and lived our future, and begs that we turn from the road we are on before we too are unable to flee autocracy and are forced to experience it.