The Importance of Mises and Rothbard

In Paul Krugman’s attack on Ron Paul, he uses Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom against those who oppose government health care:

In the past, conservatives accepted the need for a government-provided safety net on humanitarian grounds. Don’t take it from me, take it from Friedrich Hayek, the conservative intellectual hero, who specifically declared in “The Road to Serfdom” his support for “a comprehensive system of social insurance” to protect citizens against “the common hazards of life,” and singled out health in particular.

Hayek, of course, erred, and now his words have come back to bite us. This doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a good man who wrote a good book. But it means that he was willing to compromise with the state. The views of the uncompromising Mises and Rothbard are needed now more than ever. It is no wonder that Ron Paul has their pictures on the wall in his congressional office.

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7:20 am on September 17, 2011