Bruce Caldwell, editor of Hayek’s collected works, is interviewed here on the new edition of Road to Serfdom:
I’ll give you one example of some relevance for today. One of his major themes was that in times of war, national leaders will use the war to grow the size of government. And it doesn’t have to be a World War II sort of war. You can think of wars on poverty, wars against drugs, wars on terrorism. All of these are wars that the leaders have used to say we need to have more government, bigger government, more government involvement — and particularly if it’s a war that is open-ended. I mean World War II actually came to end. It’s hard to think that the war on terrorism would ever come to an end, or a war on poverty, or a war on drugs for that matter.
It means that the mandate for government to keep trying to — well, it didn’t work, so we need to try something else, and we need more resources. Often, particularly, it wasn’t just a resource issue. Civil liberties — the surrendering of civil liberties during wartime — is one of the things he was afraid of, worried about then, and I think is always appropriate to be worried about.
