Friday, September 11, 2009

Quote of the Day: On Hayek

"According to the current Republican orthodoxy, Friedrich Hayek was a socialist." Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan quotes directly from Chapter 9 of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, one of the canonical, almost biblical, texts of conservatism. Read Sullivan's whole entry, which focuses on Hayek's defense of the kind of government program of the sort that the healthcare reform proposals of today represent.

I, myself, have been giving Hayek's book a re-reading over the past weeks to try to understand how far "modern" conservatism, the Limbaugh/Bachmann/Hannity/Wilson kind, has strayed from conservative orthodoxy into the realm of the absurd.

More Hayek pearls of wisdom from The Road to Serfdom will be coming soon. Stay tuned!

2 comments:

Eric said...

Cheater McFeater!

You stole my next book club pick!

;-)

Huck said...

Sorry, Eric! But, hey, if you haven't read it, want to read it, and think of the book club as a motivation for reading it, feel free to pick the book anyway. Don't let the fact that I will have re-read it prevent the group as a whole from tackling it. I'm always game for a discussion of it.