Booknotes began in 1989 but I didn't watch it religiously until 1992 when I had an all-night editing job on Sundays. I would alter editing and dubbing and the dubs would each take 60 minutes so I had a lot of free time. I don't know what it was about the show that captured my imagination, two guys sitting in a black studio discussing a single book. I think it intrigued me how knowledgeable each guest was about some obscure piece of history or contentious issue. It became my favorite show, the one in which TiVo gets the most miles, and it will be missed.
Luckily the transcipts are available online and the repeats will still air on C-SPAN 2. There were some great exchanges by great minds. Milton Friedman on the Lessons not learned from the fall of the Berlin Wall:
FRIEDMAN: Everybody agrees, as a result of the experience in the West, that socialism has been a failure. Everybody agrees that capitalism has been a success, that wherever you have had an improvement in the conditions of the ordinary people over any lengthy time, it's been in a capitalist society, and yet everybody is extending socialism. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there were no summits in Washington about how we cut down government. The lesson from the fall of the Berlin Wall was that we have too extensive a government and we ought to cut it down. Everybody agrees, but yet wherever you go, we have to extend socialism. The summit in Washington was about how you enable government to get more revenue in order for government to be more important, which is exactly the opposite. So socialism guides our behavior in strict contrast to what we believe to be the facts of the world.
Friedman was on to discuss his introduction to the 50th Anniverary edition of Friedrich Hayek's THE ROAD TO SERFDOM. Hayek is such an important figure in free market economics that host Brian Lamb has asked several authors through the years about his influence. Lamb's last guest was a liberal college professor, Mark Edmunson, who wrote a book called "Why Read?" Lamb showed a clip of Friedman talking about Hayek and then this exchange:
LAMB: He`s talking about "Road to Serfdom" - Hayek - a bible for people on the conservative political side.
EDMUNDSON: I`m glad to know about it. Until this moment, I`ve heard nothing about it. But I will write it down and give it a look.
LAMB: So, you`ve never read "Road to Serfdom."
EDMUNDSON: Never. Nor heard of it, until this moment.
LAMB: Mark Edmundson, we`re out of time. Thank you for joining us.
Funny that I once mentioned this book to a liberal friend of mine when we were discussing economics and he had the same reaction. It came up because he said that there had never been an adequat intellectual argument for supply-side (he called it trickle down). You just don't get Hazlitt, von Mises, Hayek, Sowell, Friedman, or Rothbard on the college campus, I suppose.
Anyway, I'll miss the show and enjoy the repeats.
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