When Friedrich August von Hayek, one of the most influential economists of the 20th century and a Nobel laureate in economic sciences, published The Road to Serfdom in 1944, he was not writing a manifesto for markets but a warning for civilization. Having fled Austria following the rise of Adolf Hitler, Hayek had witnessed how societies, in the name of justice and planning, slid into servitude.

His message was simple yet radical: Whenever governments try to design prosperity, they destroy the knowledge, spontaneity and freedom that make prosperity possible.

For Hayek, “economy” was not a ledger of production and consumption. It was a living network of human cooperation—an emergent order in which millions of strangers align their plans through law, property and price, not compulsion. Th

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