The editor of the collected works of F.A. Hayek, Bruce Caldwell, participated in an interview with FutureOfCapitalism.com that we wrote up here back on February 11. This week he has an article up at WashingtonPost.com on why Road to Serfdom has been selling so well:
the underlying reason for the sustained interest in Hayek's book is that it taps into a profound dissatisfaction in the public mind with the machinations of its government. Both Presidents Bush and Obama have presided over huge growth in the size of the federal government and in the size of the federal deficit, with little obvious effect on unemployment. Things seem out of control.
Furthermore, a recurrent theme in the news is that, in contrast to the millions who are suffering, the politically connected are doing just fine. The examples are everywhere, from bailed out financiers getting huge bonuses to public union employees getting hefty pensions, from auto companies that are nationalized instead of going belly up to politically savvy firms that get government subsidies to produce products that would be otherwise unprofitable.
We learned about the Post article by reading about it on the Cato Institute's Cato@Liberty blog.