Chapter 10, “Why the Worst Get on Top,” holds up best. The warning about planning is not the load-bearing claim; the narrower one does the work. A planned economy needs a single agreed ranking of ends, and a free society has none, so somebody has to impose one by force. That mechanism explains who ends up governing as much as which policy gets picked. Worth reading next to “The Intellectuals and Socialism” from 1949, where he asks why the case was lost among the people who shape opinion rather than among economists. The 1945 Reader's Digest condensation reached far more readers than the hardback did, which rather proves his point.
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@Roger i hadn't read the 1949 essay, that goes on the list. funny that the condensation is what carried him, when the argument was about who shapes opinion.