Why the Worst Get on Top, Hayek's Most Uncomfortable Chapter

Every socialist experiment comes with the same footnote. The idea was beautiful; unfortunately, the wrong people got in charge. Lenin was the wrong person. Then Stalin was the wrong person. Then a long line of colonels, chairmen and commandantes turned out to be the wrong people too. At some point the honest observer has to ask whether the wrong people keep getting in charge by coincidence, or whether the system is hiring them.

Friedrich Hayek asked exactly that in 1944, and his answer is the most uncomfortable chapter in The Road to Serfdom. It is chapter 10, titled "Why the Worst Get on Top." Its claim is not merely that central planning fails economically. Plenty of people had said that. Its claim is that planning selects for ruthlessness, because the job requires things decent people will not do. Let me set the scene, read the chapter's argument closely, and then answer the best reply to it.

London, 1944

Hayek was an Austrian economist who had come to the London School of Economics in 1931 and become a British subject in 1938. During the war the LSE was evacuated to Cambridge, and Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom there, while bombs fell on London and while British intellectuals of nearly every party agreed that after the war the economy would be planned from the center.

That consensus is the book's real target. Hayek was not writing for Nazis or Communists. He was writing for decent British progressives who had looked at wartime mobilization, admired its efficiency and wanted to keep it. His dedication says so in six words: "To the socialists of all parties." It is one of the great dedications in political writing, polite and pointed at once. He was telling Labour, Liberal and Conservative planners alike that the road they shared led somewhere none of them wanted to go.

The book was published in London in March 1944 by Routledge and in the United States that September by the University of Chicago Press. In April 1945 Reader's Digest published a condensed version, which put Hayek's argument in front of a mass American audience and sent him on a lecture tour. A dense book by an Austrian economist became, briefly, a popular sensation. The planners did not see that coming. Nobody ever plans for that.

The setup in the chapters before

Chapter 10 depends on an argument built in the chapters before it, so here are the premises in order.

1. Central planning means a single authority deciding what is produced, how and for whom. That requires a single, complete scale of values: a ranking of every end against every other.
2. No such agreed scale exists in a free society. People disagree about the relative worth of houses, hospitals, churches, highways and holidays, and those disagreements are the substance of freedom.
3. Democratic assemblies cannot agree on a complete plan, because majorities can form on general rules but not on the thousands of specific trade-offs a plan requires. So legislators delegate, and power flows to the experts and the executive.
4. Eventually people demand a strong man who will just get things done. Hayek's point is that this demand grows out of the frustration planning itself creates.

Chapter 10 picks up from there and asks: when the strong man and his apparatus are assembled, who will staff it?

The three reasons, read closely

Hayek gives three reasons why a large, uniform, disciplined group capable of imposing a single plan is likely to be drawn from the least admirable elements of a society. They are not about any particular nation. They are about arithmetic and psychology.

First: uniformity is found low, not high. The more educated and intelligent people become, Hayek argues, the more their views and tastes differ, and the less likely they are to agree on any particular hierarchy of values. If you want a large group with strongly similar views, you have to descend to the level where more primitive and common instincts prevail. This is, as he puts it in substance, the lowest common denominator. The group that unites millions behind one plan will be united by what is simplest in them, not what is best.

Second: the docile and the gullible can be recruited. A would-be leader does not need to find people who already share his views. He can find people with no firm views at all and supply them. Those who are easily led, whose passions are easily roused, and who will accept a ready-made system of values if it is drummed into their ears loudly and often enough, swell the ranks. The planner's movement grows by converting the unformed, not by persuading the thoughtful.

Third: it is easier to agree on a hatred than on a program. This is the darkest point and the most enduring. People agree more readily on a negative program, on hatred of an enemy or envy of those better off, than on any positive task. The contrast between "we" and "they," Hayek observes, is an indispensable ingredient of any creed that solidly welds a group together for common action. So the planned society needs an enemy: the kulak, the speculator, the foreigner, the bourgeois, the saboteur. The enemy is not an accident of the system. It is part of the machinery.

The moral selection

After the three reasons, Hayek turns to what the job itself demands, and this is where the chapter earns its title.

A collectivist society recognizes no moral limits on the pursuit of the collective goal. The individual is a means. If the plan requires seizing the grain, moving a population or silencing a critic, the plan wins. Hayek's point is that someone has to do those things, and the positions that require them will be filled by people willing to do them. He borrows an image from the Chicago economist Frank Knight to make the point: the probability that people who dislike wielding power will end up running a planned state is about as high as the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping-master on a slave plantation.

So the selection runs in one direction. The scrupulous drop out, or are pushed out, at every rung. The unscrupulous rise, because readiness to do bad things becomes a qualification for advancement. Hayek is careful here. He does not say the planners begin as villains. He says the system rewards villainy, and over time the people who reach the top are those the system has rewarded.

Lord Acton gave the classic formula in a letter of 1887: power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Hayek's chapter adds a second mechanism to Acton's. Power does not merely corrupt the people who hold it. Concentrated power attracts the people who are already corrupt, and gives them a head start.

The best reply, stated fairly

Now for the strongest objection, and it is a good one. Let me state it the way a thoughtful defender of the postwar British settlement would.

Hayek predicted that planning would lead to tyranny. Britain tested the prediction. From 1945 to 1951 the Labour government under Clement Attlee nationalized the Bank of England, coal, the railways, electricity, gas, and iron and steel, and created the National Health Service in 1948. Rationing continued into the 1950s. And Britain did not become a dictatorship. Elections went on. Labour lost in 1951 and handed power to Winston Churchill peacefully. Parliament, the courts and the press stayed free. Hayek's thesis was simply wrong.

That is a fair statement of the reply. Here is the answer in five parts.

1. Britain did not carry out the plan Hayek described. The chapter is about comprehensive central planning, a single authority directing the whole economy toward a single scale of values. Postwar Britain nationalized a set of industries and built a welfare state, but most of the economy stayed in private hands, prices were partly decontrolled, and the government retreated. In 1948 and 1949 Harold Wilson, as President of the Board of Trade, boasted of a bonfire of controls. A country that turns back before the end of the road is not evidence that the road has no end.
2. Even the partial plan reached for coercion. In 1947 the government took power, through a Control of Engagement Order, to restrict where people could take jobs, notably in coal mining, and to route job-seekers through labour exchanges. It was withdrawn in 1950. But notice the logic: within two years of peace, a democratic government in the oldest parliamentary nation on earth found that its plan needed authority over where citizens worked. That is Hayek's mechanism appearing on schedule, and then being refused by a people with deep habits of liberty.
3. British institutions were the brake, not a refutation. Parliament, an independent judiciary, the common law, a free press and a political culture centuries old resisted the logic of planning. Hayek's argument is that planning strains those institutions. Britain's survival shows the institutions were strong, not that the strain was imaginary.
4. Where planning went all the way, the prediction held. The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe under Soviet control, Maoist China, North Korea and Cuba each pursued comprehensive planning, and each produced exactly the leadership chapter 10 describes: secret police, show trials, scapegoated classes and leaders who advanced by ruthlessness. The natural experiments are reviewed in Two Germanys and two Koreas, the natural experiments that socialism lost, and a once-prosperous country's slide in Venezuela was once Latin America's success story, and then came socialism.
5. Hayek did not claim inevitability. He said the tendency was strong and the direction dangerous, and he said in his 1944 introduction that he was not calling the outcome inevitable, and in his 1976 preface he denied that any step toward socialism must end in totalitarianism. The objection refutes a stronger thesis than the one in the book.

So the British case, read carefully, is not a counterexample. It is the chapter's best illustration of how a free people can stop partway down the road, and of why they should.

Why the chapter still applies

The economic case against planning is the calculation problem, which Ludwig von Mises set out in 1920 and which we explain in Mises Showed in 1920 That Socialism Cannot Calculate a Single Price. Chapter 10 adds a moral case that survives even if you think the planners could somehow calculate. Grant them perfect information. They still need a single scale of values imposed on people who do not share it, an apparatus to impose it, and personnel willing to staff the apparatus. The selection problem remains.

Three applications for today.

• Any concentrated discretionary power has a selection problem. It need not be full socialism. An agency that can make or break an industry with a rule attracts the people who want that kind of power, and the people who want to use it on someone. Public choice economics studies this soberly, as we describe in Public Choice Theory Studies Politicians as People, Not as Angels.
• Watch for the enemy. When a program's advocates spend more energy naming villains than explaining mechanisms, Hayek's third reason is at work. A movement united by a negative program will keep needing new targets.
• Moral limits are a feature. A free society's refusal to do certain things to people, even for good ends, is precisely what keeps the worst from rising. Constitutional limits, enumerated powers and a Bill of Rights are not obstacles to good government. They are the filter that keeps the whipping-master's job from being created in the first place.

The Founders understood the filter. Federalist No. 51 explained that ambition must be made to counteract ambition, because the framers assumed that power would sometimes fall into bad hands. They did not design a system that requires saints at the top. They designed one that limits the damage when the top is not saintly. Hayek arrived at the same place from the opposite direction: by showing what happens when a system requires the opposite of saints, and gets them.

The case in brief

1. Chapter 10 of The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944 and dedicated "To the socialists of all parties," argues that central planning tends to put the worst people in charge.
2. Its three reasons are that large uniform groups form at the level of the lowest common denominator, that the docile and gullible are easily recruited, and that people unite most readily around hatred of an enemy.
3. Because planning recognizes no moral limits on the collective goal, its positions reward people willing to do what decent people refuse, so the selection runs toward ruthlessness.
4. The reply that postwar Britain planned without tyranny fails: Britain stopped short of comprehensive planning, still reached for powers over where people worked, and was held back by old institutions, while countries that went all the way confirmed the chapter.
5. Limits on power, constitutional and moral, are what keep a society from creating jobs that only the worst will fill.

What you can do: read chapter 10 of The Road to Serfdom alongside Federalist No. 51, and use the debate desk to practice answering the claim that planning only failed because the wrong people ran it.