For years, European policymakers have tried to engineer prosperity from above—with regulations, subsidies, prohibitions, mandates and political targets. The result is increasingly visible: declining competitiveness, high energy costs, weaker investment and growing pressure on European families.

The lesson should be clear: prosperity cannot be planned. Friedrich August von Hayek understood this danger better than most. When he published The Road to Serfdom in 1944, he famously dedicated it “To the socialists of all parties.” This was deliberate. Hayek’s warning was not confined to people who called themselves socialists. It was directed at everyone—left, right or centre—who believes that governments and experts can replace the decentralized decisions of millions of individuals with a superior economic plan.

The fundamental problem is knowledge. No ministry, bureaucracy or commission can possess the dispersed information held by millions of consumers, entrepreneurs, workers and investors. Markets coordinate this knowledge through prices, competition, profit and loss. When governments increasingly replace these signals with political instructions, subsidies and prohibitions, distortions inevitably follow.

Today, Hayek’s warning is strikingly relevant to European economic and energy policy. The Green Deal increasingly attempts to prescribe outcomes: which technologies should succeed, which energy sources should disappear, what companies should produce and how citizens should consume. This is not merely environmental policy. It reflects an old economic temptation: the belief that political planning can produce better outcomes than decentralised discovery.

Environmental stewardship matters. But making Europeans poorer will not make Europe greener. Energy demonstrates the problem particularly clearly. Affordable and reliable energy is essential to almost everything we produce. If Europe deliberately raises its own energy costs while international competitors secure cheaper supplies, European industry loses investment, production and jobs. Europe then becomes less competitive and more dependent— the opposite of sovereignty.We need technological openness instead. Politicians should establish clear rules and then allow engineers, entrepreneurs and investors to compete in finding better solutions. Innovation cannot be commanded by decree. And ultimately, families pay for bad economic policy. They pay through electricity bills, housing costs, taxes, lost purchasing power and fewer opportunities for their children.

A genuine pro-family policy therefore starts with a prosperous economy: sound public finances, competitive taxation, secure property rights, affordable energy and the freedom to work, save, invest and build

something for the next generation. Europe already possesses the entrepreneurs, scientists, workers and families capable of renewing our prosperity. They do not need another master plan from Brussels. Hayek’s message remains essential: no political party has a monopoly on the temptation of central planning.

Making Europe prosperous again means resisting that temptation and rediscovering what made Europe successful in the first place: economic freedom, competition, responsibility and confidence in the individual.

Europe does not need more planning.

Europe needs more freedom.

Dr. Barbara Kolm – Member of the National Council; President of the Hayek Institute, FPÖ (Austria)