John Robb writes an excellent post arguing that the concentration of wealth in the United States has resulted in a centrally planned economy. I wanted to expand on his writing.
After World War II, there was a widely held view that Nazi Germany was the result of failed capitalism. Economists and political scientists in the UK and across much of western Europe thought that Capitalism was a bad thing and the answer was socialism.
A now famous economist called Fredreich von Hayek argued in The Road to Serfdom, published in the early 1940’s, that Nazi Germany was actually the result of central planning. He suggested that a centrally planned government is destined to become fragile and is easily seized and taken over by those that might not play by the rules.
Hayek was based in England, but his book was far more popular in the United States and it may be the reason we ended up with a free market economy post WWII.
John Robb’s idea is a new and useful lens to examine our political and economic decline: Through capitalism gone wild, we may have ended up with all the trappings of socialism after all.
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