How times have changed. Now the president reads the address, but others write it. Nor is the address to Congress. It’s an infomercial for the president and his party targeting the electorate. President Barack Obama said “we can’t wage a perpetual campaign.” Yet he just had to mention that he reads letters from children “each night.”

Mentioning “the children” has become typical of presidential addresses, as have other themes. As Ted DeHaven’s blog post titled “Bush’s Third Term” shows, Obama’s statements on jobs, energy, housing, and other topics sound so similar to Bush’s, you might think they have the same speechwriters.

Typical of modern State of the Union addresses, Obama’s made grand promises including special-interest tax breaks, tax “credits” for those who pay no income taxes, new government programs, and more government fixes to problems made worse by previous fixes.

To deliver the change he promised, the president should have shown Congress a rap video: “Fear the Boom and Bust” by EconStories.tv. With insight, wit, and rhyme, Friedrich Hayek explains how Keynesian fiscal policy fuels economic booms and busts. “It’s legit, it’s really good rapping,” Ke$ha told NPR.

Congressmen would see in themselves what Nobel Laureate Hayek calls the “fatal conceit.” Says Hayek: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

The Daily Camera (Boulder) published this article on January 30, 2010.

As a former co-chair of the campus group OMF, a market-anarchist student group at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I was quite angered to receive YAF posters in the mail of George W. Bush and Anne Coulter [click here at your own risk, cringe!] is admirable defenders of freedom. I was even more offended (though a bit appreciative I admit but upon further reflection…even more pissed]) when someone truly deserving of this, F.A. Hayek was included.

Surely you’re not the first to hear this, but libertarians are not conservatives! Just because we are not Lefties, were are not conservatives, and nor are we, unlike G.W. Bush, Big Government Conservatives! How can you in good conscience pair Bush with Hayek when Bush has expanded government more than Clinton, and lacks the back bone and principles to veto *any* of the garbage legislation his GOP cronies proposed?!

Why not replace Bush with a poster of Milton Friedman – a true defender of liberty and capitalism? I appreciate your honoring him on your website, but your putting Bush and Coulter on a poster is like spitting in his face.
Please remove me from your mailing list.

Brian Schwartz
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Post script, not submitted:

And somehow I missed the irony in their including a poster of Hayek in their letter that starts “Thank you for efforts to advance conservative ideas on your campus!” You see, there’s a well-know essay called “Why I am not a Conservative” by…guess who? By one Friedrich August von Hayek! Crazy huh? Here’s an excerpt:

Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments.

Sounds like a pretty good description of what’s going on, huh? Well, he wrote that in The Constitution of Liberty — in 1960!

(For more photos of Hayek, just enter “Hayek” into a Google image search. Woo ah!)