“A LEFTIST winning the Nobel Prize? Wow!”
“Has a conservative ever won?”
A few
Rudyard Kipling for literature 1907.
Winston Churchill for literature in 1953.
Friedrich A. von Hayek for Economics 1974.
Milton Friedman for Economics 1976.
Hayek wrote this amusing essay “Why I am not a Conservative”
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/hayek.htm
He called himself a “liberal”, by which he meant laissez faire 19th century liberal. What he called socialist, we now call Liberal. And what Hayek calls “conservative” we call Bush!
“Closely connected with this is the usual attitude of the conservative to democracy. I have made it clear earlier that I do not regard majority rule as an end but merely as a means, or perhaps even as the least evil of those forms of government from which we have to choose. But I believe that the conservatives deceive themselves when they blame the evils of our time on democracy. The chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power.[8] The powers which modern democracy possesses would be even more intolerable in the hands of some small elite.”
“Admittedly, it was only when power came into the hands of the majority that further limitations of the power of government was thought unnecessary. In this sense democracy and unlimited government are connected. But it is not democracy but unlimited government that is objectionable, and I do not see why the people should not learn to limit the scope of majority rule as well as that of any other form of government. At any rate, the advantages of democracy as a method of peaceful change and of political education seem to be so great compared with those of any other system that I can have no sympathy with the antidemocratic strain of conservatism. It is not who governs but what government is entitled to do that seems to me the essential problem.”
Hayek was a great thinker!