I take that as a “yes”. That’s what I figured. This is a great topic for a thread. I’m interested to see what kind of list emerges.
I guess the first person I think of is Friedman. This is of course not to say I don’t still admire him (so I guess this doesn’t totally count), but I was disappointed when my positions moved to less and less government, and no central bank, etc., and I went back and read through his positions from that perspective it was just disheartening. But in reality, it’s almost a disappointment that he wasn’t perfect, I guess, and I suppose it’s not fair hold a lot of those positions against him, especially considering how far he blazed the trail. But then again, he was a contemporary of Rothbard, and basically debated him on more than one occasion, so I suppose there’s no reason he couldn’t have come around.
But even more than that, I was actually considerably more disappointed with Hayek after reading Block’s assessment (PDF). And of course Block wasn’t the only one who pointed it out.)
When you think about things like the Hayek “Beck bomb”, and then realize that’s what all these people are getting…I mean, it’s great they’re discovering the economist and probably getting introduced to the Austrian School and free market ideas they never heard, but still. It’s a pretty big drawback when the “solution” is so similar to the problem.
It was a hard pill to swallow to see Hayek’s pro-state views all laid in a row like that.