Hayek and the “Tea Party canon”
This summer’s unlikeliest hit book, F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, continues to attract notice. Glenn Beck, the Fox News host whose endorsement of the book in June catapulted it up the best-seller list, recently used the book’s success as evidence that his “audience is devouring books like never before.” Over the weekend, the New York Times concurred with Beck and included Road in an article on the emerging “Tea Party canon.” Taking stock of Hayek’s pervasive influence on the current political landscape, the Times reported:
Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, alluded to The Road to Serfdom in introducing his economic “Roadmap for America’s Future,” which many other Republicans have embraced. Ron Johnson, who entered politics through a Tea Party meeting and is now the Republican nominee for Senate in Wisconsin, asserted that the $20 billion escrow fund that the Obama administration forced BP to set up to pay damages from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill circumvented “the rule of law,” Hayek’s term for the unwritten code that prohibits the government from interfering with the pursuit of “personal ends and desires.”
Justin Amash, the 30-year-old Republican state legislator running for the House seat once held by Gerald Ford in Michigan, frequently posts links to essays by Hayek and Bastiat on his Facebook page, his chief vehicle for communicating with voters. “There is no single economist or philosopher I admire more than F. A. Hayek,” he wrote in May. “I have his portrait on the wall of my legislative office and the Justin Amash for Congress office.”
Read more on the Tea Party’s reading list here. And check out an excerpt of the introduction to the book that, according to Glenn Beck, “will make your eyes bleed” on our site here.