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Showing posts with the label The Road to Serfdom

The Road to Addiction

Let's say a prominent psychologist writes a book with the above title. He is writing it as a warning to casual drug users: "You think you can just use heroin / cocaine / meth recreationally, but what you have done is you have set in motion a process that, unless counteracted, will lead to full-blown addiction." Now, it is one thing to argue, "This guy is overstating the dangers: there is nothing wrong with such usage if it is under control." But it is quite something else to claim he is been proven wrong because some recreational users you know did not become full-blown addicts, and this contradicts the author's claim that full-blown addiction is the inevitable result of any drug usage. Obviously, since he wrote the book to warn recreational users, he did not think there was any inevitability about the matter! And so it is with Hayek's The Road to Serfdom : I have my own criticisms of the book, but can we stop with the canard that Sweden, the UK, D...