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In this week’s magazine, Adam Davidson writes about Friedrich von Hayek, a shy, often misunderstood Austrian economist whose ideas are inspiring a new generation of Republican leaders, most notably Paul Ryan. Ryan has cited Hayek’s seminal work, “The Road to Serfdom,” which was published during World War II, as a major influence on his own thinking. (He also lists it, along with Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” as a favorite book on his Facebook page.)

In 1945, Look magazine published a comic strip entitled “The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons.” It sketches Hayek’s alarming vision of how politicians — even the well-intentioned ones — may one day exert their control over every facet of private life. The result is a bureaucracy that has the power to fire a citizen, starve him and even snap his golf clubs over its knee as it forces him to jazzercise. Jump to 5:07 in the video.

This being a comic strip, many of the nuances of Hayek’s argument are lost between the frames, and in the wake of World War II, Hayek’s vision of a grasping, totalitarian bureaucracy may have struck readers as prescient as it was alarmist.

The question remains how far Hayek’s contentious ideas will penetrate mainstream politics. Read the full column to find out what Republican leaders have got right (and wrong) about Hayek so far, and what it could mean for the future of the party.