In Saifedean Ammous’ podcast with Thomas Massey, Hayek is accused of being a little too socialist and his book The Road to Serfdom overrated. He is praised, however, for being diplomatic enough with the mainstream to remain relevant until winning the Swedish Central Bank Prize (the so-called Nobel Prize), and then speaking the anarchist language.
The Road to Serfdom is the only book by Friedrich Hayek that I have read, and based on just that, I have to disagree with the socialist-lite characterization. The ideas he promotes are libertarian. He does not go up against the Keynesians, but then, the book was meant to target socialists, which it did.
Hayek confines the roles of the government to formulating a legal framework for all economic actors to function within, and enforcing predetermined penalties upon lawbreakers. Is this what’s regarded as socialism-lite?
I don’t know what an anarchist critique to this position would be. If I am to speculate, it is that even creating a legal framework by government entities is top-down (hence, coercive) and unessential. Laws emerge from interactions among men over time. In the past, governments simply adopted these emergent laws to boost their legitimacy, just like governments adopted gold (the money that naturally arose from free commerce) as currency to boost their legitimacy. A government is no more needed for making laws than it is needed for making money. Courts and other enforcement mechanisms would emerge naturally in the free market without government meddling, and they would serve us better than governments would.