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In The Road to Serfdom, there is a rather chilling passage in which Hayek writes that “the manager of any plant” needs to be given “considerable” power, and approvingly quotes an engineer on the importance of economic spontaneity versus planning: “there ought to be surrounding the work a comparatively large area of unplanned economic action. There should be a place from which workers can be drawn, and when a worker is fired he should vanish from the job and from the pay-roll. In the absence of such a free reservoir[,] discipline cannot be maintained without corporal punishment, as with slave labour

Freedom for whom?

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