This fellow has it right: “Right wingers love Friedrich Hayek.” I do.
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher cited his ideas as central to the social revolutions they hoped to spark.
Did not know that but am glad to hear it and am not surprised.
Antigovernment ideologues admire him as one of those few who kept Adam Smith’s fires burning during the dark reign of John Maynard Keynes in the West; his most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, has sold more than 350,000 copies in the United States alone.
I bought it. If that be ideologuism, make the most of it.
And the modern right has enlisted Hayek as a political weapon: Why can’t those loony lefties acknowledge the simple and obvious truths that he understood?
Wait. This too is news to me. Hayek is not quoted much in what I read. As for why loony lefties don’t buy H., it’s because they are stupid, that’s why.
This fellow — Jesse Larner, author of Mount Rushmore: An Icon Reconsidered (Nation Books, 2002) and Forgive Us Our Spins: Michael Moore and the Future of the Left (Wiley and Sons, 2006), writing in Dissent for Winter 2008 — has been reading up on Hayek, he said, “much as, in my twenties, I decided I really ought to read the Bible [because it’s] influential, whether I it or not.”
He has found him “a surprise, in several ways, nowhere near as extreme as his ideological descendants.”
But he makes “a powerful and far-ranging critique of state control of economic life.” What makes for serfdom, in Hayek’s argument.
Keynes called it “a grand book.” Orwell found in it “a great deal of truth . . . collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of.”
But in Road, says Larner, Hayek “thoroughly, eloquently, and convincingly demolishes an idea that virtually no one holds nowadays.”
In 1944, however, when it was published? The conventionally wise were horrified at it then and condemned it right and left. In the U.S., nonetheless, it sold immensely well, because it shot down conventional (Keynesian) wisdom.
And today there are governmental meddlers who want so much to run things, thinking they know best, which they do not.
It’s a relatively simple, small, moving book, a sort of catechism or introduction to free-market thinking, based on the revolutionary notion that human nature “is what it is,” to use a catch phrase of our day, meaning you can’t get away from it.
Blithe Spirit 
Those who gain real power, who espouse well-meaning ideas for improving society, end up tyrants who have to kill more and more people who disagree with their solutions. The more people he kills, the more the people find ways to resist him (or try to kill him). His paranoia grows and he thinks he needs to crack down. The spiral into horror continues until the people revolt or the system collapses, i.e. the U.S.S.R., Romania, China under Mao, Cuba.
We are stuck with human nature which is selfish. People will work to survive and to better themselves and to make life better for those they love. Take away the incentive to work by confiscating wages and assets and people make the sensible decision to slack off. Soon we are reduced to the Russian joke, “We’ll pretend to work if you’ll pretend to pay us.”
Worse, when the natural tendency of humans to be entrepreneurial is thwarted, the economic engine sputters and fails. A government bureaucracy cannot organize a system for meeting human needs like the billions of humans can successfully do on their own — captialism unfettered. The desire to make a buck has people doing jobs for others that they would never do otherwise.
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