In his most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944 von Hayek (1994 ed.) argued that both fascists and socialists believed that economic life should be “consciously directed” and that economic planning should be substituted for the competitive system. But to achieve their ends, planners had to create concentrations and categories of power at magnitudes never known before. Democracy was an obstacle to the suppression of freedom inherent in this concentration of power. There- fore, planning and democracy were antithetical. Von Hayek thought that concentrating power so it can be used in planning not merely transforms, but heightens, power. By uniting in the hands of a single body power formerly exercised independently by many, a degree of power is created that is infinitely greater than any existing before—indeed, power so far- reaching as almost to be different in kind. No one in competitive society can exercise even a fraction of the power possessed by a socialist planning board. The power of a millionaire employer over the individual employee is less than that possessed by the smallest bureaucrat, wielding the coercive power of the state, deciding how people are allowed to live and work. When economic power is centralized as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery. For von Hayek, in a country where the sole employer is the state, opposition means death by slow starvation. Thus, what was promised as the “road to freedom” (socialist planning) was in fact the “high road to servitude.” For von Hayek, any planning, even by social democracies, leads to dictatorship, because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion. Democratic socialism, the great utopia of the past few generations, was simply not achievable. And the further growth of collectivism would mean the end of truth. To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the ends selected by those in control; it is essential that the people should come to regard these ends as their own. This is brought about by propaganda and by complete control of all sources of information. Hence, von Hayek concluded, the guiding principle in any attempt to create a world of free men must be this: a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy.