Ian Vásquez
Ian Vásquez
(Screenshot: Amazon.com)
This fall marks both the 50th anniversary of economist Friedrich Hayek winning the Nobel Prize and the 80th anniversary of the publication of his book The Road to Serfdom in the United States. Below, I reproduce an article (roughly translated) that I published in Peru last week about Hayek’s classic book.
Hayek had a huge influence in Peru, perhaps more than in any other Latin American country. In 1979, on the eve of the transition from military rule to democracy, economist Hernando de Soto invited Hayek to Lima, Peru to lecture. There, he met with other classical liberals like novelist and Nobel laureate in literature Mario Vargas Llosa and Cato adjunct scholar Enrique Ghersi, among others.
Hayek emphasized many of the messages in The Road to Serfdom while in Peru. In 1990, after years of heterodox and ruinous policies, Vargas Llosa ran for president on an explicitly libertarian platform. He lost the election to Alberto Fujimori but won the battle of ideas. Peru ended up adopting a far-reaching, free-market agenda along the lines that Fujimori had originally opposed.
Through regime changes and a succession of administrations, Peru has stuck to Hayekian-inspired economic policies, which have transformed the country and made it one of Latin America’s success stories.
“The Road to Serfdom?”
It has been 80 years since the publication of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in the United States. Almost instantly the book became a classic and, within days of its publication, there were requests for its translation into Spanish and other languages.
Like any classic, the book by the Nobel laureate in economics was influential in its time and has remained so despite the changing times. With the Nazi dictatorship and the cataclysm of World War II in mind, Hayek warned against central planning. He worried that the collectivist mentality in democracies such as England’s would harm freedom significantly and could lead to totalitarianism, » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/hayek-peru-road-serfdom