Steven Horwitz
The New York Times has piece on the reading being done by "Tea Party" types that includes mention of Hayek and Bastiat, specifically The Road to Serfdom and The Law. What's funny is that they refer to these books as "once-obscure texts by dead writers". And the ideas are referred to as "long dormant."
Putting aside Bastiat, how is it possible to argue that Hayek's ideas are either dormant or obscure, especially as they do manage to note he won the Nobel Prize in 1974? That would suggest something other than obscurity. And a quick read of a recent WSJ article would suggest something other than "dormant." But more important: Road to Serfdom wasn't even obscure when it was published! It was excerpted in Reader's Digest, given the cartoon treatment in Look, and Hayek was invited to give a lecture tour of the US. If that's "obscure," I'd like to join the club!
Note also the way in which the article seemlessly moves from Austrian economics/Hayek/Bastiat into issues of religion and Tea Party crackpottism as if somehow the latter issues are necessarily connected up with the former.
Thanks, I guess, to the NYT for recognizing that Tea Partiers can actually read real books, but either not doing their homework or conveniently ignoring the facts, makes Hayek/Austrian economics seem like just more crackpottery on the shelf of the Tea Party.
UPDATE: As Greg Ransom points out, the reporter doesn't even know what "the rule of law" is, attributing it as a term Hayek used for "the unwritten code that prohibits the government from interfering with the pursuit of “personal ends and desires.”" Sigh.
I wouldn't worry about it too much - it was great exposure and overall it was an extremely positive picture (I didn't pick up on any sarcasm like "oh Tea Partiers can actually read"). The Times wrote an article describing the "intellectual ballast" (their words) of the Tea Party. I think that's great.
Your point on "dormant" and "obscure" is very well taken, though. I think that probably applies to Bastiat, but it was sloppy to lump Bastiat and Hayek together on that.
I also think you've just gotta live with the coexistence of Austrian economics, religion, and "crackpottery" in the Tea Party. They DO coexist there, after all. If the Times was doing an article on GMU, the religion stuff would never come up. But if you're going to describe the background of the Tea Party I don't see how you're going to get around that coexistence. God knows Keynesianism gets lumped in with lots of other views of people who've allied themselves with Keynes. Is there a risk that people will think that Keynesianism consists of the politics that some people bring with them to it? Sure there's a risk. But if you're describing a political movement, like the Tea Party, I'm not sure what other option there is than to describe all the influences that are there. It would be more misleading to try to whitewash it, right?
All in all, I think the article was very good and great press. The more people know about Bastiat and Hayek, the better, and I don't think their were any substantial distortions there.
I blog more about the article and Jeff Tucker's reaction to it (and in an update, your reaction to it) here:
http://factsandotherstubbornthings.blogspot.com/2010/10/hayek-and-bastiat-in-new-york-city.html
Posted by: Daniel Kuehn | October 02, 2010 at 10:51 AM
I'm not going to confuse a Tea Partier's intentions in reading Hayek and Bastiat with the actual results of having read them. We'll see what happens when and if the Tea Party--and not the Republicans who are trying to co-opt it for electoral gain--enter the halls of power.
Posted by: Eric Hosemann | October 02, 2010 at 11:27 AM
It is still the case that the New York Times and its readers live in a very "special" world. I mean special in the sense it is often applied as a euphemism for intelligence problems.
Posted by: Mario Rizzo | October 02, 2010 at 11:32 AM
The only bad publicity is an obituary. So I agree the article is a plus overall. There is a tone to it, but it is mainly of bewilderment.
The article suffers from a major failing of the NYT has a newspaper. The Times has a policy of having reporters not specialize and report on issues of which they know little.
Within that NYT paradigm, the reporter did his homework. He notes that Hayek won the Nobel Prize in 1974. He quotes from the Law, etc.
There are errors and ironies in the piece. Start with the simple fact there is no unified Tea Party. It is a movement, not an organization. The NYT actually ran an article documenting that fact.
The Road to Serfdom and The Law have been core texts of the vast rightwing conspiracy for as long as I've been alive. Anyone who went to a FEE seminar, joined YAF, or was involved with ISI would know the texts.
The reporter didn't do enough homework to grasp the tension between the two texts. The Law is a radical text. In the Road to Serfdom, Hayek now looks quite moderate. He is more ordo liberal than libertarian. It is not the more radical Hayek of later years.
And, of course, the main text of the movement is the U.S. Constitution. Cato can't print up its pocket Constitutions fast enough to get hem into the hands of the Tea Party.
Finally, the reporter seems unaware that taxing people to provide for welfare support is alien to America. It did come in with the Progressives, and was a foreign in origin. Those who doubt that should read Cleveland's veto of the Texas Seed bill.
Posted by: Jerry O'Driscoll | October 02, 2010 at 12:18 PM
Is it any surprise that the paper whose motto once was "all the news that's fit to print" picks and chooses who we are supposed to read and those we should ignore? Hayek's and Bastiat's influence throughout society speaks volumes despite attempts by most academia and the main stream media to disparage them. I suppose that the next victims of the truth squad might be Shakespeare, St. Thomas Aquinas, Adam Smith, etc.
Posted by: Bob | October 02, 2010 at 12:23 PM
Nah, Adam Smith's cool. He wrote a book on how we should regulate commerce because businessmans conspire against consumers, remember?
More seriously though, it's always surprising to me that The Law is the most popular of Frédéric Bastiat's essay, considering it addresses socialists that are long gone and forgotten. Maybe the reason why it is so popular among conservatives is because god is mentioned in every sentence or so (though it's never the argument), a trait that isn't as important in his other texts. Anyhow, Tea Partiers would probably gain a lot from reading other essays from Bastiat such as "Property and Law", on how property is prior to law and not a product of the law, and "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen" on unintended consequences.
Posted by: Mathieu Bédard | October 02, 2010 at 04:14 PM
I continue to suspect that most of the tea partiers buying RtS at the behest of Glenn Beck are not actually reading it, or not reading it very carefully. There is much in it that they would not like if they did so.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser | October 02, 2010 at 04:54 PM
The Tea Party folks come in many flavors. The demographics are interesting and need to be studied more. It strikes me more or less as a cross section of America.
I know a senior executive who took leave from a major corporation to devote full time to the TP. Many leaders are women, including the aforemtentioned executive. Ron Paul supporters form a core of the group.
Domestic policy is the overwhelming focus of the group. There are many religious people in the TP, but social issues are not the group's focus.
The movement has united the libertarian/conservative Rand Paul and the socially conservative Sarah Palin.
I'm not sure how many read the Road to Serfdom. Many do apparently read the Constitution, which I suggested is the principal text.
Posted by: Jerry O'Driscoll | October 02, 2010 at 05:39 PM
Jerry,
An excerpt from my play "Hef's Bunnies" relevant to your comments on the ignorance of reporters:
A group of T.V. news people arrive with cameras. They are led by Dick Jockman. When they arrive, the animal rights activists group together and gesture about, clearly planning their media strategy.
Dick: Let’s set the cameras up right over here.
I don’t want to obscure a camera’s shot.
Ranger Peter: Excuse me, but you cannot set them up
Right there. That is protected habitat.
Dick: Protected habitat? For what? What’s here?
Ranger Peter: You don’t know why you’re here?
Dick: I cultivate
My ignorance with care so there’s no danger
That I will bias my report. I do
Not know a thing and I am proud of it.
Ranger Rick: And yet I know you went to school . . .
Dick: Of course.
A football scholarship to major in
Communications. I avoided sports
Reporting for the reason that I knew
Too much about the area to do
The kind of job that I’d been taught to do.
Ranger Rick: A regular Lou Dobbs of reporting
On the environment, I see. How splendid.
Posted by: Troy Camplin | October 02, 2010 at 06:55 PM
Jerry - what's your take on the Tea Party vis a vis the Ground Zero mosque or other similar issues. I have quite a bit of trouble with this idea that the Constitution provides some sort of bedrock for them when I think about stuff like that.
It is a diverse group, though - and that's an important point to make. But I think it's probably fair to say that a very large portion of that group harbors the sort of animosities that we've seen shared by two third of the public on issues like that. Ron Paul and a few others offer important exceptions - the point is not to tar them all. But it also strains the idea that the Constitution is really any driving force with them.
I don't know - I'm not a libertarian, but I have a lot of libertarian sympathies and I would strongly caution libertarians against completely embracing the Tea Party. It's a very mixed bag, and I think there's a lot of populism in there that won't necessarily be friendly to the Constitution under all circumstances.
Posted by: Daniel Kuehn | October 02, 2010 at 07:47 PM
And I should say the fact that the Tea Party is a mixed bag is not a bad thing at all - that's a very good thing. It's one of the nice things that I've found about not identifying with either party, and about having a deliberately and decidedly independent stance. It's the advantage of non-hierarchical groups and this has been remarked upon repeatedly about the Tea Party (and of course long before the Tea Party). So I don't mean that as a bad thing. But just as I am very careful not to endorse anyone bandying the label "independent", I think it's probably not smart to simply embrace the Tea Party. I think there's still a lot of uncertainty about the group.
Posted by: Daniel Kuehn | October 02, 2010 at 07:50 PM
Daniel,
Good questions. The Tea Party is grass roots, and there is no "party plank" on issues. I think Americans as a whole are disquieted by the Mosque at Ground Zero.
It's not a question about rights, but what is right. Most of the critics concede the Mosque can be lawfully built. The critics think it is an affront and a generally bad idea.
There is a lot of populism on the political right. That is a new development -- a Populist Right. One manifestation of the populism is a demand to return to the Constitution. One can only guess where that will take us.
Posted by: Jerry O'Driscoll | October 02, 2010 at 09:27 PM
This is one of the few things I've written about the Tea Party:
http://zatavu.blogspot.com/2010/04/decentralized-power-of-tea-party.html
Posted by: Troy Camplin | October 02, 2010 at 09:41 PM
On the topic of community activists, here is a long and not very friendly piece on some friends of GMU.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all
No I do not subscribe to the New Yorker. This is the source, a prolific source of good material.
http://erudito.livejournal.com/
Posted by: Rafe Champion | October 02, 2010 at 11:18 PM
My mothers reading group -- which usually reads Oprah type books -- is reading Atlas Shrugged.
Something is happening in the country.
And trust me. These 150,000 new TRtoS owners are reading the book.
I see their twitter messages and blog postings all the time.
Tea Party folks on media are better educated and better informed than almost any voting block you can identify.
And better educated and better informed than most of the academics And graduate students I've known -- who haven't been impressive in the least.
Posted by: Greg Ransom | October 03, 2010 at 02:16 AM
Greg -
I think they're probably extremely well educated in a narrow way, though. They know what they believe very well. But whenever they talk about what others believe they demonstrate a severe under-education. Unfortunately that's not restricted to the Tea Party. I think people in general have a tendancy to narrowly educate themselves when they're educated at all. Was it always this way? I'd like to think it wasn't, but I don't know.
Posted by: Daniel Kuehn | October 03, 2010 at 06:03 AM
Either way, they are more formally educated than the general population. And they seem to be more economically literate than the general population (let alone the Left, who are about as economicalyl illiterate as anyone could imagine).
Posted by: Troy Camplin | October 03, 2010 at 06:45 AM
The Tea party is the right-wing version of the rise of moveon.org and code pink and the like on the left that stirs up in the base of any party when the other side wins the white house. What is new?
as for tea party primary wins over incumbents, did not Liebermen lose his democratic party primary race to an anti-war candidate.
In 2006 and 2008, many democratic party incumbents invested in covering their left-flank and investing in anti-war credentials.
The very real threat of a well-funded primary challenger was an incentive for more than a few undecided democratic party congressional members to vote for Obamacare.
Posted by: Jim Rose | October 03, 2010 at 07:34 AM
A friend lectures to Tea Party members and asked how many read the Austrians, specifically Mises and Hayek. He said about 60% raised their hands. That clearly beats the economics profession.
Let us distinguish being educated from being "sophisticated," or an intellectual. They are not intellectuals.
Posted by: Jerry O'Driscoll | October 03, 2010 at 01:58 PM
Survey results show Tea Partiers to be better informed about civic affairs than any other block.
Go argue with the pollsters.
Posted by: Greg Ransom | October 03, 2010 at 02:26 PM
Most of the Tea Partiers I know have advanced degrees and work in the real world .
This gives them local knowledge and real world experience "intellectuals" and academics don't have.
Posted by: Greg Ransom | October 03, 2010 at 02:30 PM
Greg and Jerry,
I rather suspect that the TPers you and your friends encounter are indeed better educated than many people, including the majority of TPers. The ones where I am all seem to think that Medicare is not "socialized medicine," while somehow "Obamacare" is (a lot of these people are Medicare recipients, gosh darn).
It would help if people here would keep in mind that the "mosque being built at Ground Zero," is a) being built two blocks away and completely out of sight of Ground Zero, and b) is a community center not a mosque. Calling it a "mosque" is like calling a YMCA a "church."
Finally, there were deep disagreements at the time of the putting together of the Constitution among those who wrote it. So, people today who think that there are unambiguous answers coming from reading the Constitution about many issues are not so very well educated.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser | October 03, 2010 at 04:37 PM
True enough, Barkley.
But still, survey says ..
Like I said, go argue with the pollsters.
Posted by: Greg Ransom | October 04, 2010 at 01:08 AM
Barkley,
The polls say otherwise. This isn't about the exceptions you or I or anyone else may know, but the average as determined by polls. The exception doesn't negate the rule. One can point out the occasional foolish comment in any large-enough group, but that hardly proves anything.
Posted by: Troy Camplin | October 04, 2010 at 01:22 AM
"Most of the Tea Partiers I know have advanced degrees..."
Doesn't sound very populist to me.
Posted by: Dain (Mupetblast) | October 05, 2010 at 03:06 PM
What kind of movement would be populist that excluded the 24% of people over 25 who have college degrees?
Posted by: Troy Camplin | October 05, 2010 at 05:28 PM