By Shlomo Dubnov, JNS
Austrian-born British economist Friedrich August von Hayek saw law and order not as conservative slogans, but as the pre-requisite of liberty. Without them, capital retreats, entrepreneurship hesitates, and trust erodes.
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. The wonder of civilization, he argued, is that no one needs to command it. As long as rules are predictable and property secure, society organizes itself. Economy, in that sense, is the visible form of freedom.
Today, as New York City flirts with electing a self-described Democratic Socialist as mayor, Hayek’s ghost seems to hover above the campaign trail. Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old assemblyman representing Queens, N.Y., who built his political identity on rent freezes, free buses and high taxes on the rich, offers a vision that would make Hayek’s spine stiffen: an economy moralized and centrally guided, a city run by prerogative rather than by conscience of a free market.
To the Austrian-born British economist Hayek, that is not reform. It is the beginning of the end of economy.
Written amid the wreckage of fascism and the rise of Soviet planning, The Road to Serfdom was Hayek’s plea for humility. No committee, however benevolent, could ever command the dispersed knowledge held by millions of individuals. Prices, he explained, are signals, not sins; they condense countless judgments about scarcity, value and desire. To fix them is to blindfold society.
His deeper argument was moral. Freedom, Hayek insisted, requires the rule of law—general, predictable rules that allow people to plan their lives. When policy becomes discretionary, when regulators and redistributors replace judges and contracts, coercion re-enters public life. “The danger,” he warned, “is that authority becomes arbitrary, and citizens cease to be free except by permission.”
Mamdani’s platform turns that warning inside out. He envisions a city of guaranteed affordability—rent freezes, fare-free buses, city-run grocery stores and universal childcare, with steep corporate and millionaire surcharges to fund it all. The state, not the market, would define fairness; equity would replace efficiency as the measure of success.
In moral terms, it sounds compassionate. In Hayek’s logic, it is the start of economic amnesia when prices no longer convey cost, compassion turns into coercion. When neither landlord nor tenant, producer nor consumer can act rationally, society forgets its aspiration, replacing prosperity and free human spirit with moral zealotry.
The delicate information network that coordinates New York’s complexity dissolves, replaced by administrators deciding what is “affordable” or “just.” Hayek did not oppose conscience; he opposed its politicization—the moment when morality leaves the individual heart and becomes the blueprint of the state. In that transition, moral intent turns from self-restraint in the service of social good into a collective command, and freedom gives way to virtue enforced. What begins as protection soon becomes dependence.
He saw law and order not as conservative slogans but as the prerequisite of liberty. Secure property and predictable policing convert power into cooperation. Without them, capital retreats, entrepreneurship hesitates, and trust erodes.
This is why Mamdani’s tumultuous history with the New York City Police Department matters. In 2020, he called the department “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety,” urging to defund it. As a mayoral candidate in 2025, he apologized and acknowledged “the officers who risk their lives daily,” yet his proposed Department of Community Safety, intended to shift resources away from traditional policing, revealed the same impulse to redesign rather than reform.
From a Hayekian perspective, this is not simply about crime; it is about predictability. If the institutions enforcing the law become politicized or morally conditional, then the rule of law weakens. Investors, landlords and citizens can no longer assume uniform enforcement; law becomes a tool of ideology rather than a framework for liberty.
Mamdani’s ideology also extends beyond municipal economics. A longtime supporter of the anti-Israel BDS movement and a co-founder of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter during his time at Bowdoin College in Maine, he has urged New York institutions to sever ties with Israeli universities, such as the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.
For Hayek, this use of economic instruments as political weapons would be the very definition of coercion. Boycotts, in his view, turn markets—the neutral meeting ground of diverse actors—into arenas of moral enforcement. They replace cooperation with exclusion, substituting ideological purity for voluntary exchange.
What makes this especially ironic is that much of the progressive Jewish community in New York—voters who mobilized for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and now sympathize with Mamdani—embraces these politics under the banner of justice. The question almost asks itself: Why do so many liberal Jews champion a movement whose underlying philosophy runs against economic freedom, and often, Jewish self-determination?
Part of the answer may lie in history. American Jews have long associated socialism with safety—a defense against the unregulated cruelty of the market and the prejudice of elites. Sanders, and now Mamdani, evoke the prophetic language of equality and care that resonates with Jewish ethical tradition. To many, opposing capitalism feels like fulfilling a commandment.
There is also a psychological undercurrent worth mentioning, one discussed in modern cultural theory as “moral masochism.” It describes a pattern, especially in guilt-based cultures, where virtue is sought through self-accusation. To relieve collective guilt, individuals or groups turn moral criticism inward. In some strands of Jewish progressive thought, this takes the form of identifying with the oppressed, even when Jews themselves are among them.
Applied to economic life, this manifests as suspicion toward success, wealth or ownership—values Hayek saw as prerequisites for freedom. In a guilt culture, freedom itself can feel morally dangerous because it implies responsibility. Mamdani’s appeal among progressive Jews may thus reflect not betrayal, but a spiritual inversion: the belief that to renounce power, even economic power, is the highest ethical act.
Hayek’s economics was never about money. It was about humility. No human design, he felt, can match the subtle intelligence of freedom. The greatest wealth of nations lies in their ability to let people err, to let markets signal and to let law restrain only coercion, not choice.
Mamdani’s program—presumably well-meaning, eloquent and morally confident—envisions fairness achieved by decree. Hayek would counter that fairness, when imposed, erodes the very conditions that make compassion sustainable. In the long run, you can redistribute only what freedom has first created.
Hayek’s legacy endures because his warning transcends ideology: Tyranny begins not with hatred but with planning for good. Every utopia starts as a moral vision of fairness; every decline begins with the loss of economic humility. The road to serfdom is paved with compassion enforced by policy. If New York chooses that road, then it won’t be the first city to learn that when freedom yields to moral command, the economy does not merely falter. It ends.
