The idea that those in authority know best—that they are engaged in social engineering on behalf of people who do not understand what is good for them—was not born in 1945, but it flourished in the de...
The intellectual case for planning was never very strong. Keynes, as we have seen, regarded economic planning much as he did pure market theory: in order to succeed, both required impossibly perfect d...
The wider the spread between the wealthy few and the impoverished many, the worse the social problems: a statement which appears to be true for rich and poor countries alike. What matters is not how a...
There is a widespread sense that since ‘they’ will do what they want in any case—while feathering their own nests—why should ‘we’ waste time trying to influence the outcome of their actions.
This cohort of politicians have in common the enthusiasm that they fail to inspire in the electors of their respective countries. They do not seem to believe very firmly in any coherent set of princip...
This makes it much easier to institute radical departures in public policy. In complex or divided societies, the chances are that a minority—or even a majority—will be forced to concede, often against...
This reduction of 'society' to a thin membrane of interactions between private individuals is presented today as the ambition of libertarians and free marketeers. But we should never forget that it wa...
Until 1957 the West German Ministry of the Interior banned any screenings of Wolfgang Staudte’s (East German) film of Heinrich Mann’s Der Untertan (‘Man of Straw’, 1951)—objecting to its suggestion th...
War, in short, concentrated the mind. It had proven possible to convert a whole country into a war machine around a war economy; why then, people asked, could something similar not be accomplished in...
What did trust, cooperation, progressive taxation and the interventionist state bequeath to western societies in the decades following 1945? The short answer is, in varying degrees, security, prosperi...
When the Red Army finally reached central Europe, its exhausted soldiers encountered another world. The contrast between Russia and the West was always great—Czar Alexander I had long ago regretted al...
Why does this matter? Because—as the Greeks knew—participation in the way you are governed not only heightens a collective sense of responsibility for the things government does, it also keeps our rul...
Zkrátka a dobře – lidem, kteří mluví o všem, hrozí ztráta schopnosti mluvit o něčem.
A political class deeply sensitive to its moral and social responsibilities.
Financial transactions have displaced the production of goods or services as the source of private fortunes, distorting the value we place upon different kinds of economic activity.
Otherwise—to deny distinctions of class or wealth or influence—is just a way to promote one set of interests above another.
Refugees from the East sought desperately to convince bemused French, American or British officials that they did not want to return ‘home’ and would rather stay in Germany—of all places. They were no...
Where the ‘Chicago boys’ got their ideas, we shall find that the greatest influence was exercised by a handful of foreigners, all of them immigrants from central Europe: Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Ha...
A closed circle of opinion or ideas into which discontent or opposition is never allowed—or allowed only within circumscribed and stylized limits—loses its capacity to respond energetically or imagina...
Above all, the new Left-- and its overwhelmingly youthful constituency -- rejected the inherited collectivism of its predecessor. To an earlier generation of reformers from Washington to Stockholm, it...
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