Isaac Chan’s Reviews > The Road to Serfdom > Status Update

Note n/n:
in the name of 'redistribution', or having it siphoned away by inflation and taxes. Thus I still broadly favour capitalism but I wonder if capitalism's effects trickle down into my immediate goals of becoming a useful team member in the bank.

Note 5/n:
Does it even affect me tangibly any more if the world, or the country I live in, moves capitalist or socialist? I suppose all I want right now for the world is that it remains peaceful and allows economic mobility so that I can concentrate on my work (without the fear of war or geopolitical disruptions), accumulate wealth, and not having that wealth expropriated by me in the end by some slimy socialist ...

Note 4/n:
banking, the day-to-day minuscule roadblocks and troubles I face, for example getting chewed out by Gan over the 2 overdue reviews and thus stressing over the long-term ramifications this may have for my professional reputation, I reflect on how I have moved on from being an idle ideologue to a locked-in economic agent who only cares about maximizing my own utility (and also my family and SO's utility).

Note 2/n:
nationalist, whether that be Hegel, Marx, or Friedrich List. I am also troubled by this narrative because my listening to heterodox sources implant in me the idea that the British Empire did not practise what it preached: it protected its domestic industries and only preached free trade to poor nations after it had become rich and successful, to trap poor nations in Ricardian comparative advantage i.e. ...

Note 1/n:
Hayek's narrative on the spread of English ideas across space - that for > 200 years (at the point of his writing), English ideas have spread eastward until 1870, when England started to become an importer of Eastern (German) ideas - is interesting, but I, as a non-historian, cannot verify it. But it does strike me for the first time that the German intellectuals do seem to be generally socialist and ...

Note n/n:
whereas the 2 intellectual forebears of National Socialism, Thomas Carlyle and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, were a Scot and an Englishman. (Hayek's point is that it is nonsense to bifurcate that Brits: classical liberals; Germans: socialists)

When I read 'On liberty', I could not sense that Mill drew such influence from Goethe and Humboldt: but I have faith in Hayek's knowledge as a Mill scholar.

Note 7/n:
returning to Malaysia. I just wonder if this benefit of migration has diminished in today's globalized and technologically connected world.

5) An interesting point by Hayek: Mill's 'On liberty' drew significant inspiration from 2 Germans - Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt (which, coincidentally, is the person that I told Joyce about, who originated the modern research-teaching university model!) - ...

Note 6/n:
no point in writing this. They can be prevented if people realise in time where their efforts may lead.'

4) Some interesting observations by Hayek on how living in different countries allows one to live through the same events/ histories twice, and thus anticipate the consequences of such developments accordingly. I definitely agree with Hayek on this point, having lived in Britain for years before ...

Note 5/n:
never finished.

3) I have increasingly come to puzzle over why the left strawmans Hayek by claiming that he said that a society that dabbles with interventionism WILL result in poverty and serfdom: Caldwell taught me that the TRTS was Hayek's WARNING, not prediction - and he makes this clear right in the introduction. 'Nor am I arguing that these developments are inevitable. If they were, there would be...

Note 4/n:
central planning.

2) The essay by Caldwell that I read earlier, 'Introduction to TRTS', has provided valuable context. Hayek mentions in the preface that he feels compelled to write TRTS and it forced him to put aside academic work that he feels more qualified for and attaches more importance to in the long run: I know now that that work was 'The abuse and decline of reason' project, which he ultimately...