His target was specifically the expansive “Declaration of Rights” published by the author and public intellectual H. G. Wells in 1939, a list of eleven articles including the right to education, food, health care, and employment. Hayek did not object so much to the material provisions. His own proposal included ele­ments of a basic social safety net and even countercyclical state spending. As libertarians ­later lamented, The Road to Serfdom called for “the security of a minimum income” and “a comprehensive system of social insurance.” What galled Hayek was Wells’s combination of the language of rights with a program of centralized economic decision making. For Hayek, rights talk could not work alongside state direction of production and ­labor.

Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, loc. 410