The philosophical icon of the Tea Party

From Eric Dondero:

Major piece in the UK Independent "Friedrich Hayek: Darling of the right is reborn in the USA" July 3. It features Glenn Beck as the modern promulgator of Hayekian philosophy. It also mentions Rand Paul as a Republican candidate carrying the Hayekian free market flag.

Excerpt:

In a renaissance laced with ironies, a political treatise penned in the aftermath of the Great Depression is waved around on Fox News as if it is a holy book, and its Austrian-born author, dead for 18 years, has been anointed Philosopher King of the right-wing Tea Party movement that is sweeping the grassroots of the Republican Party.

"Like Mike Tyson in his prime," says Fox host Glenn Beck, Hayek delivered "a right hook to socialism in Western Europe and in the United States." From beyond the grave, he expects the economist to deliver a right hook to Barack Obama, too

On the same Fox programme in which Glenn Beck proselytised Hayek's tome, he also waved a copy of 'Atlas Shrugged', the 1957 novel by Ayn Rand, the Russian-American philosopher who is another darling of the libertarian right. This book, too, has found its way back into the charts. In it, Rand fantasises a "strike" by America's most productive capitalists and creative scientists, driven away by government interventions that restrict their businesses and redistribute their wealth, a strike that leads to the collapse of society. Alan Greenspan, the deregulating chairman of the US Federal Reserve, was a Rand devotee.