Gerald O´Driscoll’s Speech during the Ceremony for Honor Graduates (November 2018)

Aletse López  | 20 de noviembre de 2018  | Vistas: 36

Gerard O’Driscoll, named honorary professor and awarded an honorary doctoral degree by UFM, highlights the importance of the book Road to Serfdom written by Friedrich Hayek and presents why collectivism doesn’t work during his speech in the ceremony for honor graduates of the November 2018 commencement.

The fundamental problem of any kind of collectivism decisions is that all individual have their own preferences and the clash between individual desires and a central plan is irreconcilable, Driscoll says. All attempts between WWI and WWII to have democratic socialism failed because democracies can’t make decisions that all agree on.

Road to Serfdom is one of the most important books that have been published [...] that book changed the world.”

Hayek’s argument was that a democratic socialism inevitably generates into an authoritarian socialism. Driscoll talks about his paper based on Chapter 10: Why the worst get on top and summarizes that it was the system that turned good people into bad people because they wanted to succeed in the system.

What Hayek wanted to show is that while people thought that fascism and nazism or communism where somehow opposite, they all came out of the same intellectual point of view.”

Finally, Driscoll encourages the audience to keep Hayek’s ideas in mind for political decisions, because people believe in a romantic socialism but forget to think where's the money going to come from and who’s going to pay for everything?

Check out his speech during November 2018's commencement, where he received the honorary doctoral degree. 

Related: Discurso del Rector durante el Acto en Honor de los Graduandos Distinguidos (Noviembre 2018)