The "Road to Serfdom" Becomes a Super Highway 
By Robert Maynard

This weekend I received an e-mail, which underscored a common theme that has been making its way through the media and has been expressed by many politicians and political activists who support the so-called health care "reform" bill.

The e-mail in question was forwarded to me and was from Rev. Debbie Ingram who identified herself as the Executive Director of Vermont Interfaith Action. In her e-mail, she informed the intended recipient that:

"Most faith-based groups support some kind of reform that covers everyone; is affordable for all Americans, even low-income individuals and families; and is financially sustainable for our nation. These are the key elements that leaders of the denominations are looking at when they choose whether to ask their members to advocate for health care reform."

"Encouraging people to do what their conscience tells them is of course a fundamental principle of the UCC and many denominations. Yet there must also be some key values that we all share that we can take a stand on: that "we are our brothers' and sisters' keepers" and that "we love our neighbors as ourselves" are two of them, intertwined, that lead many people of faith to say that we must reform our health care system so that all God's children have access to the quality care they deserve."

I would like to put this argument aside for now and take up the mischaracterization of the opponents of the bill being passed off as health care reform. While assuring the recipient that he/she was acting in a civil manner, Rev. Ingram goes on to slander the whole opposition movement:

"While some people, like yourself, are mostly supportive but asking hard questions that deserve answers, there is a concerted extremist effort led by groups called "tea baggers" who are organized in disrupting town hall meetings across the country, shouting obscenities at Congress people, and shouting down the comments of supporters of health care reform. This extremist movement is hopefully not the majority of people, but they do exist, and it is those people, not the ones who are asking thoughtful questions, who are behaving in a way that many UCC clergy and lay people find unacceptable."

What is "unacceptable" is the slandering of a grass roots movement of concerned citizens who seek to hold their government accountable. This tactic is being used by the media, as well and politicians and political activist groups who wish to silence the voices of those who dissent from the direction we are currently traveling.

The concern expressed by the "tea baggers" is not merely over the health care bill, but the sudden acceleration in a general move toward centralized and expansive government. In raising this concern, they are echoing the concerns of Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Von Hayek. Hayek expressed this concern in a 1944 book entitled "The Road to Serfdom". The book points out that the road to serfdom is paved by centralized planning, which dismantles the free market and ends up with the destruction of personal and economic liberty. The central theme of his book is that all forms of collectivism tend toward tyranny. He used the examples of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as nations that have already traversed the road to serfdom and arrived at tyranny. His concern was that the welfare state societies of the West were heading down the same path of political centralization and economic central planning, but at a slower pace.

As more functions of a healthy society are assumed by the national government, unelected bureaucracies are given more power for which they are not held accountable for to the citizens. Thinkers like Hayek see such a trend as detrimental to a free and prosperous society.

Instead of slandering the tea party movement in an attempt to silence them, our political class should pay more attention to their concerns, which just may turn out to be prophetic.

Robert Maynard is the Editor of the True North website