The popularity of F.A. Hayek seems to be really driving the folks at the left-of-center Nation magazine crazy. A recent issue carried an article by the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. professor of history at the City University of New York, David Nasaw, that expressed some skepticism about the charitable gift deduction:
Isn't it time to at least inquire about the long-term effects of the charitable deduction? Not to do so is equivalent to sitting quietly on our deck chairs as the wealthy and their billion-dollar foundations are given huge tax subsidies to assist them in bankrolling tax-exempt charitable organizations that support such causes as outlawing abortion and birth control, defunding public schools, abolishing inheritance and income taxes, ending gun control, withdrawing funding from the United Nations and other international organizations, eliminating environmental protections, ridiculing climate change science and combating climate change initiatives, repealing healthcare legislation and deifying Friedrich Hayek.
It's the "deifying Friedrich Hayek" that really gets them!
Meanwhile, in the same issue, a profile of Republican congressman Paul Ryan carries this sentence: "Ryan, a faithful follower of free-market orthodoxies outlined by Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, will thus be the highest-profile advocate for what many imagine to be 'Reaganomics' since Reagan." As opposed to the orthodoxies of the Nation magazine....
