NYT: Tea Party Movement Draws on "Long-Ago Texts by Dead Writers" (= AUSTRIANS!)

Hey hey hey... Is New York Times finally getting it?

Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-Ago Texts
(Kate Zernike, 10/01/2010 New York Times)

The Tea Party is a thoroughly modern movement, organizing on Twitter and Facebook to become the most dynamic force of the midterm elections.

But when it comes to ideology, it has reached back to dusty bookshelves for long-dormant ideas.

It has resurrected once-obscure texts by dead writers — in some cases elevating them to best-seller status — to form a kind of Tea Party canon. Recommended by Tea Party icons like Ron Paul and Glenn Beck, the texts are being quoted everywhere from protest signs to Republican Party platforms.

And what are those texts by dead writers? They are 'Austrian' dead writers:
(Links go to Lewrockwell.com's pages that list their books.)

Frédéric Bastiat
Friedrich Hayek
Ludwig von Mises

If they haven't done so, Tea Partiers should also read:

Henry Hazlitt
Murray Rothbard
Tom Wood
Thomas DiLorenzo
Ron Paul
Peter Schiff

And of course much more at:
Lewrockwell.com
Ludwig von Mises Institute

The NYT article seems to correctly identify the Tea Party Movements as movements "built around ideas rather than leaders".

Ding ding ding ding...

That's what Ron Paul's movement was all about for 2008 election: self-organizing, around ideas. Instead of waving and screaming in ecstasy at the sight of their dear leader like Democrats did, Ron Paul supporters went nuts when Ron Paul said the Federal Reserve must go.

And o horror of horror, as New York Times reports, these "Teabaggers" (as liberal blog writers derisively call Tea Partiers) are actually "studying" these dead men's books!

Doug Bramley, a postal worker and Tea Party activist in Maine, picked up “The Road to Serfdom” after Mr. Beck mentioned it on air in June. (Next up for Mr. Bramley, another classic of libertarian thought: “I’ve got to read ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ ” he said.) He found Hayek “dense reading,” but he loved “The 5000 Year Leap.”

“You don’t read it,” Mr. Bramley said, “you study it.”

Across the country, many Tea Party groups are doing just that, often taking a chapter to discuss at each meeting.

Doing what? People actually studying and discussing the ideas other than those of John Maynard Keynes and Paul Krugman? What heresy!

NYT is even starting to recognize that there's Glenn Beck's (and Sara Palin's) version of Tea Party and there are other versions, not the monolithic right-wing fringe movement sponsored by Koch brothers as mostly portrayed in the MSM like New Yorker magazine.

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