Being towards death

When coercion wears the mask of compassion, and plunder dons the robes of legislation, the cornerstone of social justice crumbles into dust under the gentle strangulation of power.#

                                                   ——Hayek

I. Power Monopoly: The Grave Digger of Fairness#

In Hayek's thought laboratory, power monopoly is dissected into threefold poison:

1. The Cancer of Coercion

   • The British Parliament passed the Corn Laws to artificially raise grain prices, depriving workers of bread for the benefit of landlords.
   • Modern administrative agencies create thousands of entry permits, requiring power to redeem everything from barbers to street vendors.
   • After the nationalization of oil in Venezuela, crude oil production plummeted by 75%, and fairness devolved into a hunger game.

2. The Suffocation of Spontaneous Order
   The collapse of the Soviet-style planned economy reveals a terrifying truth:

   • Bureaucrats in Moscow had to decide the prices of 20 million goods.
   • The granaries of Ukraine starved 8 million people in a year of plenty.
   • Stagnation in innovation left technology 20 years behind the West.

3. The Institutionalization of Corruption
   The mathematical model of rent-seeking:
   When regulatory power grows exponentially while checks and balances are absent, rent-seeking profits will consume the entire wealth of society.

II. Capital Monopoly: A Treatable Skin Injury#

Hayek perceives the fragile nature of capital monopoly:

1. The Self-Healing Power of the Market

   • Kodak monopolized 90% of the film market but was buried by the digital technology it invented.
   • Microsoft's IE browser bundling strategy was ultimately breached by Chrome and Firefox.
   • The taxi license monopoly crumbled under the impact of Uber.

2. The Corrective of the Rule of Law
   The art of checks and balances in common law tradition:

   • After Standard Oil was dismantled in 1911, U.S. oil prices fell by 80%.
   • The EU fined Google 8.2 billion euros, forcing it to open its Android system.
   • China broke the banking payment monopoly, sparking a mobile payment revolution.

3. The Limitation of Harm
   The cage of capital monopoly always has boundaries, while power monopoly spreads like nuclear radiation:

   Monopoly Type	Economic Harm	Thought Control	Personal Confinement
   Capital Monopoly	●●●○○	●○○○○	○○○○○
   Power Monopoly	●●●●●	●●●●●	●●●●○

III. The Power-Capital Complex: The Ultimate Destroyer of Fairness#

When power and capital conspire, they give birth to a Frankenstein that devours fairness:

1. Colonial Trading Companies
   The East India Company was granted:

   • Legislative power (to establish courts)
   • Military power (to form armies)
   • Taxation power
     Result: Indian weavers had their fingers chopped off, and the Bengal famine killed 10 million people.

2. Modern Rent-Seeking Empires

   • The U.S. military-industrial complex: giants like Lockheed Martin are bound to the Department of Defense, with the Afghan war costing $2 trillion.
   • The land finance of the Celestial Empire: local governments collude with developers, creating a century bubble with a housing price-to-income ratio of 36:1.

3. Digital Currency Hegemony
   The deadly temptation of the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in the Celestial Empire:

   • Programmable currency achieves precise social control.
   • Negative interest rates directly deprive savings wealth.
   • Transaction records construct a digital concentration camp.

IV. Hayek's Prescription: The Chains to Bind Leviathan#

1. The Triple Shackles of Power

   • Separation of legislative/executive powers: The Swiss seven-member Federal Council's checks and balances model.
   • Local decentralization experiments: The policy competition laboratories of U.S. states.
   • Procedural justice firewall: Article 20 of Germany's Basic Law "eternal clause" prohibits the modification of democratic principles.

2. The Antidote to Capital

   • Negative list management: The Celestial Empire's free trade zone "everything not prohibited is allowed."
   • Depoliticization of currency: Bitcoin's challenge to central bank monopoly.
   • New philosophy of antitrust: Splitting platform data hegemony rather than corporate scale.

3. Cognitive Vaccines for Citizens
   Hayek's final warning:
   "The greatest betrayal of intellectuals is to beautify coercion as compassion and package plunder as fairness."

Conclusion: The True Essence of Fairness is Freedom from Coercion#

In Hayek's intellectual star map, true fairness always points to the realm of freedom under universal rules:

• Farmers should not have to bribe power to sell their homegrown vegetables.
• Workers should be free to change jobs rather than be dependent on privileged enterprises.
• Entrepreneurs should be free from licensing shackles to achieve social mobility.

When a boy from the Chicago slums and a Silicon Valley elite are subject to the same corporate law, when street vendors and New York bankers face the same tax principles—this is the core of fairness that Hayek defends. The ultimate evil of power monopoly lies in its perpetual creation of two sets of rules: one engraved in marble for public display, the other written on parchment to deliver benefits to privileged groups.

History repeatedly validates the maxim of the "Charter of Freedom":
"When the flag of fairness is raised by power monopolists, what it covers is the asphalt road to enslavement."