PrintJune 21, 2011
Mixing up Mamet, Hayek, Hitchens, and Sowell
I was trotting along the other day, reading The Secret Knowledge by newly conservatized playwright David Mamet, when something pulled me up short. Mamet was explaining his "revelation upon reading Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. ... He wrote that there are no solutions; there are only tradeoffs... and that this is the Tragic view of life."
No he didn't, I said to myself. Hayek didn't write about the tragic view of life, not in The Road to Serfdom at any rate. Mamet must have mixed up Hayek with Thomas Sowell.
Now this doesn't really matter, except to government functionaries occupying tenured sinecures at government universities. Who cares about a bit of misattribution among friends? If David Mamet has indeed been burning through the conservative canon with a hard, gem-like flame in the last couple of years, it would be surprising if he hadn't got a few things mixed up. That's what good editors are for.
But then I ran into Christopher...(Read Full Article)
