A new ABC/​Washington Post poll is out. The trends are not comforting for the White House. President Obama’s approval rating — probably the most important number for a president these days — continues to drop. Approval by independents has fallen by 9 points over his term. Support for his handling of the economy now garners the approval of barely half of respondents. The number of people who see him as an “old-style tax and spend” Democrat has risen by 11 percentage points; the number who see him as a new Democrat “careful with public money” has dropped by about the same number.

A majority of the public now rejects a second spending splurge. Most now give avoiding deficits a higher priority than increasing spending, even to fight the recession.

The number of people in the poll identifying themselves as independents is at a post-1981 high. Most of those people may well vote most of the time for one of the major parties. For now, neither party is attracting much loyalty.

Surely some Democrats in Congress must be starting to wonder how far they should follow the president and his desire for ever greater spending.

Cato’s new staff writer, Aaron Powell, told me he had recently seen two people on the Washington Metro reading The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek. That prompted me to check the sales figures for Road to Serfdom at Nielsen’s Bookscan. And whattaya know? Sales have increased this year at an even faster pace than sales of Atlas Shrugged. (Atlas sells 10 times as many copies, but the percentage increase over last year is less.)

So far this year the most popular edition of Road to Serfdom has sold 11,000 copies. That compares with 3,000 copies at the same point last year. That’s a 263 percent increase for those of you keeping score at home.

Why? Well, no doubt huge new government spending programs and attempts to massively expand the welfare state send people looking for classic literature that makes the case for liberty and limited government. But what the Marxists call the “objective conditions” can always use a bit of help. And indeed, just as I found in investigating the sales bump for Atlas Shrugged, it looks like an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal was instrumental in boosting the sales of The Road to Serfdom.

On February 4, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, now chairman of Freedomworks, published an op-ed in the Journal titled “Washington Could Use Less Keynes and More Hayek.” Sales of Road to Serfdom, which were in the low hundreds each week since the beginning of 2009, more than doubled over the next four weeks. It seems likely that Armey’s op-ed caused the new interest.

Armey didn’t actually mention The Road to Serfdom — he just talked about Hayek and his ideas generally — but when you go looking for Hayek, you’re going to find his most popular book. So maybe we could attribute the sales bump instead to David Henderson’s review of The Road to Serfdom — titled “Still Relevant–Perhaps More So” — in the Spring issue of Regulation. But the Wall Street Journal does have a larger circulation.

Update: This item has been edited to remove proprietary information.

Actress and former Miss America Vanessa Williams reminisces on NPR about the long car trips her family used to take “when gas was like 30 cents a gallon, and my parents would complain that it was going up to 35 cents.” No wonder families could take car trips then.

But wait a minute. Williams was born in 1963. So let’s say she’s remembering family trips from about 1970–75. This chart from the Department of Energy does show that retail gasoline prices were around 35 cents a gallon at the beginning of that period, going above 50 cents by 1975. But adjusted for inflation, that was more like $1.50 in 2000 dollars.

And as Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren show (click on the chart to enlarge), the price then was about $3.00 adjusted for inflation and changes in disposable per capita income — just about what it is now. So Williams’s memory was correct — gas was about 35 cents when her family went on trips. But the implication that those were the good old days of cheap gas isn’t quite right. In terms of the family budget, gas costs about the same now as it did then.

Julian Simon used to write about how people have been deploring the lost “good old days” since ancient times. Sometimes he quoted the columnist and Algonquin Round Table regular Franklin Pierce Adams: “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”

Speaks for itself, doesn’t it?

The news was unwelcome. But the timing couldn’t have been better.

Physician lobbies like the American Medical Association and the American College of Surgeons (ACS) announced their support for the House Democrats’ health care reform plan at the very moment that Congressional Budget Office director Doug Elmendorf explained why they are supporting it.

Yesterday, Elmendorf had the following exchange with Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad (D‑ND):

Elmendorf: …In the legislation that has been reported, we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs.

Conrad: So the cost curve in your judgement is being bent, but it is being bent the wrong way. Is that correct?

Elmendorf: The way I would put it is that the curve is being raised…

That’s right. The docs are supporting the Democrats’ health care plans because the Democrats are buying them off.

The American College of Surgeons boasts that its executive committee voted unanimously to support the House Democrats’ bill because it would increase Medicare’s price controls so that over the next 10 years, Medicare would pay physicians $284 billion more than under current law. Reminds me of something New Democrat David Kendall wrote in 1994:

Not surprisingly, some specialists welcome price controls — which would lock in their high income — and fear competition, which might depress it. For example, the American College of Surgeons has endorsed the single-payer approach, which would control prices at the current level and preserve surgeons’ relative value among physicians.

Of course, to pay off the docs, the Democrats will have to rob even more people than they otherwise would.

Rep. Ron Paul now has a majority of the House of Representatives supporting his bill for an independent audit of the Federal Reserve System. He presented his case at a Cato Policy Forum recently, with vigorous responses from Bert Ely and Gilbert Schwartz.

Now more than 200 economists have signed a petition calling on Congress to “defend the independence of the Federal Reserve System as a foundation of U.S. economic stability.” The petition seems implicitly a rebuttal to Paul’s bill.

Allan Meltzer, a leading monetary scholar and frequent participant in Cato’s annual monetary conferences, declined to sign the petition and explained why: “I wrote them back and said, ‘the Fed has rarely been independent and it strikes me that being independent is very unlikely’” in the current environment.

Cato senior fellow Gerald O’Driscoll adds:

it is not the critics of the Fed who threaten its independence, but the Fed’s own actions. Its intervention in the economy is unprecedented in size and scope. It is inevitable that those actions would lead to calls for further Congressional oversight and control. 

One of the lessons here is that once you create powerful government agencies, from tax-funded schools to central banks, there are no perfect libertarian rules for how they should be run. The way to protect freedom is to let people make their own decisions in civil society. Schools have to decide what to teach, offending the values of some parents and taxpayers. The Fed can be independent and unaccountable and undemocratic, or it can be subject to the political whims of elected officials; neither is a very attractive prospect.

From CongressDailyPM:

Reacting to a statement by former GAO comptroller general David Walker that “you can’t reduce costs by expanding coverage,” [White House National Economic Council Director Lawrence] Summers said President Obama rejects that view. “We won’t make progress in costs without addressing access,” Summers said.

In other news, up is down, slavery is freedom, and if she says it’s night convince her that it’s day.