The great conservative economist F. A. Hayek LOL

[Bonhomme Richard]

I was watching cspan yesterday and came across the Woman's Conservative Group giving a talk at the Heritage Foundation.
They were talking up F. A. Hayek's book The Road to Serfdom and how important it is to the conservative movement. Bush senior actually gave him a medal.
So I got curious about Hayek.
This is so typical of the intellectual dishonesty of conservatives.
What they don't mention is an essay he wrote in his later years titled......Why I Am Not a Conservative
That's right, titled Why I Am Not a Conservative and he hits it out of the ballpark. The conservative party today is exactly what he is talking about.
http://www.fahayek.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=46
Some excerpts:

"I will nevertheless continue for the moment to describe as liberal the position which I hold and which I believe differs as much from true conservatism as from socialism"

"with no goal of their own, conservatives have been guided by the belief that the truth must lie somewhere between the extremes - with the result that they have shifted their position every time a more extreme movement appeared on either wing"

"Liberalism is not averse to evolution and change; and where spontaneous change has been smothered by government control, it wants a great deal of change of policy. So far as much of current governmental action is concerned, there is in the present world very little reason for the liberal to wish to preserve things as they are. It would seem to the liberal, indeed, that what is most urgently needed in most parts of the world is a thorough sweeping away of the obstacles to free growth."

"the admiration of the conservatives for free growth generally applies only to the past. They typically lack the courage to welcome the same undesigned change from which new tools of human endeavors will emerge."

"This brings me to the first point on which the conservative and the liberal dispositions differ radically. As has often been acknowledged by conservative writers, one of the fundamental traits of the conservative attitude is a fear of change, a timid distrust of the new as such,<5> while the liberal position is based on courage and confidence, on a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead."

"The conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the change "orderly."

This fear of trusting uncontrolled social forces is closely related to two other characteristics of conservatism: its fondness for authority and its lack of understanding of economic forces. Since it distrusts both abstract theories and general principles,<6> it neither understands those spontaneous forces on which a policy of freedom relies nor possesses a basis for formulating principles of policy."

"Like the socialist, he is less concerned with the problem of how the powers of government should be limited than with that of who wields them; and, like the socialist, he regards himself as entitled to force the value he holds on other people.

When I say that the conservative lacks principles, I do not mean to suggest that he lacks moral conviction. The typical conservative is indeed usually a man of very strong moral convictions. What I mean is that he has no political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions."

Well, that ought to be a taste of what he had to say and it is well worth following the link to his essay.