John, I heard Huckabee talking about his book on the radio, bashing “libertarians,” and it’s just so depressing. Could someone at least ask him to read Hayek or Mises or Friedman or Sowell — or to study the history of conservatism — before running his mouth?

One of the things that is disturbing when I talk to College Republican types is that so many of them seem to have merely inherited their parents’ loyalties, and their conservatism is informed by little more than Fox News and talk radio. You have Christian conservatives whose conservatism begins and ends with “it’s a baby,” and then you have hawks whose conservatism begins and ends with “our troops in harm’s way.” The limited-government/free-market idea — which, to my mind, is the universal language of conservatism — seems to have evaporated during the Bush era, or to have been dumbed down to meaning only tax cuts.

So along comes someone like the Huckster, who’s all compassion and no conservatism, and plenty of people seem willing to listen to him. It’s depressing, like I say.