Modern Serfdom

I was recently thumbing through Hayek's Road to Serfdom and I came across a salient quotation. In the forward to the 1956 paperback edition, Hayek argues that the welfare state degrades the character of a people. As evidence, he cites a sociological survey on the effect wartime regulations (soon to be made permanent by the postwar Labour government) were having on young people:

At school, in the place of work, on the journey to and fro, even in the very equipment and provisioning of the home, many of the activities normally possible to human beings are either forbidden or enjoined. Special agencies, called Citizen's Advice Bureaus, are set up to steer the bewildered through the forest of rules, and to indicate to the persistent the rare clearings where a private person may still make a choice...[The town lad] is conditioned not to lift a finger without referring mentally to the book words first. A time-budget of an ordinary city youth for an ordinary working day would show that he spends great stretches of his waking hours going through the motions that have been predetermined for him by the directives in whose framing he has had no part, whose precise intention he seldom understands, and of whose appropriateness he cannot judge...The inference that what the city lad needs is more discipline and tighter control is too hasty. It would be nearer the mark to say that he is suffering from an overdose of control already...Surveying his parents and his older brothers or sisters he finds them as regulation bound as himself. He sees them so acclimatised to that state that they seldom plan and carry out under their own steam any new social excursion or enterprise. He thus looks forward to no future period at which a sinewy faculty of responsiblility is likely to be of service to himself or others...[The young people] are obliged to stomach so much external and, as it seems to them, meaningless control that they seek escape and recuperation in an absence of discipline as complete as they can make it.

As I see it, the only difference between the society described in this passage and our own is that we lack "Citizen's Advice Bureaus."