The New York Times is curious what Tea Party folks are reading. In a recent article they report the movement has provoked a renewed interest in some classic works on freedom such as works by Hayek, Mises, and Bastiat. (Click here for full article.)Two things in this article are striking:
1) The writer opens by emphasizing the "canon" of the Tea Party is composed of "resurrected" texts written by "dead writers" and "long-dormant ideas." (What would a Hayek or Mises zombie look like, anyway? Would they garble incoherently through Austrian accents while feasting on the flesh of bureaucrats and Keynesian professors?)
2) The not-so subtle conclusion provided for the reader: "The works are more suited to protest than to policy making..."
Sandwiched between the opening and conclusion are tidbit samplings minus context constructed toward the quietly dismissive statement, "Neither Hayek nor Bastiat were writing with the United States in mind."
So there you go. The intellectual "fodder" of the Tea Party is founded on old, dusty texts whose authors are dead (Do ideas die, too?), who were never thinking of the United States (Really? Hayek wrote Serfdom
for proponents of freedom in all free societies, specifically citing the United States several times), suitable only for the rabble-roused hoi-paloi Tea Party masses, not to be taken seriously for substantive policy changes.If the mere age of texts and their authors is the benchmark for what is to be taken seriously, how new is socialism? Hayek and Mises came along after Marx, Lenin, and Engels. True, classical liberalism, founded on the idea of freedom, is older than socialism, the idea that societies can be planned and perfected through coercion. But if the mere age of ideas sets the bar of legitimacy we would need to re-institute human slavery: that institution predates all written history. Free societies came about much later in the time line of human ideas.
As for serious policy proposals, at the heart of classical liberalism and the economics that emanate from it is the acknowledgment that voluntary exchange between free individuals and the creative and productive capacities of free societies are responsible for lifting the masses out of hand-to-mouth existences. Conversely, attempting to plan and coerce society against the free development of its people leads to the arbitrary ordering of people's lives found in authoritarian regimes. Here you will find the miserable living standards one can expect from the denial of the dignity of the individual and his and her freedom.
Enter Hayek's Road to Serfdom. If his historical presentation is too "dusty" to be relevant, have a look-see at contemporary Cuba, North Korea, and the former Soviet Union.
Given our unsustainable debt and the ongoing growth of government intervention in our lives from everything from our incomes to our shower heads, a reinvigorated love of liberty founded on a sure intellectual footing seems very well suited for our times. It even seems like something free people would want to do for themselves, as opposed for waiting subserviently for their governing authorities to do for them.
So long live the dead guys and whatever grassroots movement that embraces liberty. The ideas they champion certainly do.
