All I Really Want To Do

… is, baby, be friends with you:

  • Pun Salad Manor was recently nudged by its cable provider into upgrading to a digital TV package. (It was either that or no more NESN.) There's a smattering of new stuff. Waaaay up on Channel 284 was Fox Business, which is the new home of John Stossel. The first "Stossel" show I watched had Congressman Paul Ryan invoking Hayek's Road to Serfdom in the introduction; later, Reason magazine's editor, Matt Welch showed up. Awesome. I'm hooked.

    Here's a sample from last month, where Stossel describes an instantiation of crony capitalism:

    If you prefer your blood pressure to be raised via print instead, Stossel's associated column is here; but you'll miss MSNBC's Rachel Maddow's smiling endorsement of a politically well-connected business getting fat on the taxpayer teat.

  • Speaking of Hayek, David Boaz has a good summary of what he calls the "Hayek Boom". Boaz quotes heavily from this WaPo column from Bruce Caldwell, who edits Hayek's collected works. He reports that The Road to Serfdom, had always been an OK seller, about 600 copies per month.
    But then, in November 2008, sales more than quadrupled, and they haven't slowed down since. What's more, the Kindle edition went on sale in late May 2009 and is now the best-selling book that the University of Chicago Press has offered in that format. This would be a pretty good sales record for a contemporary author, but it is nothing short of amazing for a book originally published in 1944, and by an economist, no less.
    Hm, November 2008. What happened then? Oh, right.

  • Caldwell also prepends the famous Hayek vs. Keynes rap video. A bit econ-wonky, but it's seven and a half minutes good clean fun. Crank it up, yo.


Last Modified 2022-10-04 5:47 PM EDT