Friedman and Hayek - Liberals, not Libertarians

I love reading the works of Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek. They are both defenders of liberty and Nobel prize laureates in economics. In fact, they are both economists who became celebrities in the liberty movement (this is especially true of Friedman who was much more "mainstream"). If I was to describe my impression of their respective philosophies I would say it is of Old British Whig origin. Herbert Spencer would probably be more than happy to endorse their ideas. But there is nonetheless one critique which really should turn libertarians off of their ideas. Namely - they are Statists. Hayek, in fact, is a lot more problematic in this regard. This is because his analysis of society is simply hypocritical. He was a student of Mises, and came out with amazing theories about spontaneous order and yet he still advocated statism. In simple terms, Hayek is a heretic. The real ideas of Austro-Libertarianism as developed by Mises were carried on, preserved, and advanced by one of his later students, Murray Rothbard.
So what is dangerous about the philosophy or Friedman and Hayek? Obviously, the danger is the way they very persuasively fused statism with liberal ethics. I know a lot of people, like many modern conservatives, who were influenced in their thinking mainly by Friedman and Hayek just because these two men were so popular. Margaret Thatcher in particular was famous for carrying around a copy of Hayek's Constitution of Liberty. I would argue that Hayek and Friedman are actually more dangerous than other statists such as Ayn Rand. Rand considered taxation an evil equivalent to theft - something which we will not find in the Old Whig tradition. There is also little mention in their philosophies about rights of people to ignore the state and secede from it. In this Hayek and Friedman are iron-fisted statists. In this I also fault Hayek more - he is a student of Mises who was a great proponent of freedom in this regard!
Another problem with liberal philosophies is that they rarely mention human rights. Emphasis is always on freedom and the notion of liberty. This has actually been a very negative tendency because the concept of freedom has been misconstrued. The whole idea of negative versus positive liberty has virtually destroyed liberalism from the inside out (I think the best example of this can be found in the writings of John Stuart Mill and Isiah Berlin). What has been amazing in the modern libertarian movement is the emphasis on rights. Expressed simply - we are only free to do that what we have the right to do. Rights define the scope of our freedom. And this is not (sadly) the point of view usually espoused by Friedman and Hayek.

Notheless, Friedman and Hayek's books are great to read and they certainly offer many valuable insights into the world at large. They are also always filled with great quips, such as this one by Milton Friedman: "I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater."