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"The Road to Serfdom" was written in 1944. Hayek did not write about impending tyranny in America in 2010, he wrote about impending tyranny in America and Western Europe 66 years ago. And he was wrong. There is no way around it. Hayek believed that the Western world would fall into dictatorship some time soon after 1944, due to the expanding role of the government in the economy. That did not happen. The government continued to grow - and yet here we are, 66 years later, still living in a democracy. Not only that, but our democracy has in fact expanded liberty during those 66 years, at the same time while the government was growing. Consider race relations, for example. At the time when Hayek was writing, segregation was in force. Black people in the United States were denied civil rights, they could not vote, they could not shop in the same places or drink the same water as white people, they could not send their children to the same schools as whites, and they had to sit in the back of the bus. Today, all of that is gone. Today, people of all races are equal before the law and enjoy the same freedoms. Freedom has grown at the same time as the government has grown. This was the precise opposite of what Hayek predicted. Hayek's analysis of other countries is no better. After 1944, governments in Western Europe expanded much more than in the United States. They socialized health care, banks, railways, the steel industry, the coal industry, and even car companies... but, like in America, they also kept expanding personal freedoms at the same time. It was a socialist government that gave women the right to vote in France, for example (although that happened in 1936). It was a socialist government in Britain that gave independence to India and other countries of the former British Empire. Socialist governments in Western Europe in the 50s expanded freedom of the press by eliminating pre-war censorship laws, and so on. Hayek is wrong even about the history before 1944, although his mistake is a subtle one. He gives examples of countries that had both dictatorship and economic planning, and argues that the second led to the first. But if you look at the history of every one of his examples, you will notice that dictatorship came first, and economic planning came later. First, a dictator took over; then - sometimes many years later - the government expanded its role in the economy. In other words, history shows that dictatorship can (sometimes) lead to economic planning. It does NOT show that a democratic country which adopts economic planning may slip into dictatorship. That sort of thing has never happened. No democratic country ever became a dictatorship as a result of a gradually expanding government. Dictatorship leads to expanding government. Expanding government does not lead to dictatorship. This is the lesson of history. Unfortunately, Hayek got it backwards. For those who are tempted to believe that Hayek's predictions might come true in the future, I urge you to remember that they have been wrong for 66 years and counting.