The latest dead-tree National Review presents the following:
The New York Times recently uncovered another curious fact about tea partiers: They reach to ?dusty bookshelves? for ?once-obscure texts by dead writers.? The writers, including Friedrich Hayek and Frederic Bastiat, are indeed dead, although it seems a little strange to call a work by the Nobel Prize-winning Hayek ?obscure.? By bravely plunging into this kooky book-reading, the Times discovered such ?out there? concepts as the ?rule of law,? which it explains is ?Hayek?s term for the unwritten code that prohibits the government from interfering with the pursuit of ?personal ends and desires.?? We bet it would be news to Hayek that he had come up with an idea invoked by Aristotle and John Locke, or that he believed that the best way to ensure predictable and fair treatment of citizens by the law was to have an unwritten code. Will the next news-flash be that Keynesian Democrats too read books by the dead? (Or is literacy exclusive to the Tea Party?)
If you?re going to read a book by a dead guy, Hayek or Bastiat (or Locke) would be a better choice than Keynes.
