Triple evils of modernity: Nazism, Communism and ‘Americanism’.
There is clear evidence that while homogeneity and size matter for the generation of trust and cooperation, cultural or economic heterogeneity can have the opposite effect. A steady increase in the nu...
The disposition to disagree, to reject and to dissent—however irritating it may be when taken to extremes—is the very lifeblood of an open society. We need people who make a virtue of opposing mainstr...
Tax farming is absurdly inefficient. In the first place, it discredits the state, represented in the popular mind by a grasping private profiteer. Secondly, it generates considerably less revenue than...
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If politi-cians—however well-intentioned—were barred from planning, manipulating, or directing the affairs of their fellow citizens, then extremists of Right and Left alike would be kept at bay.
Here, it was not until the mid-1970s that a new generation of conservatives felt emboldened to challenge the ‘statism’ of their predecessors and offer radical prescriptions for dealing with what they...
Fewer still in America continue to believe in what was once thought of as a ‘public service mission’: the duty to provide certain sorts of goods and services just because they are in the public intere...
Dialectics, as a veteran communist explained . . . 'is the art and technique of always landing on your feet.
The past was neither as good nor as bad as we suppose: it was just different. If we tell ourselves nostalgic stories, we shall never engage the problems that face us in the present - and the same is t...
The more varigated and complicated a society, the greater the chance that those at the top will be ignorant of the realities at the bottom.Efficiency should not be adduced to justify gross inequality.
Rigid dress codes can indeed enforce authority and suppress individuality—an army uniform is intended to do just that. But in their time, uniforms—whether worn by schoolchildren, mailmen, train conduc...
Once upon a time, one looked to society -- or class, or community -- for one's normative vocabulary: what was good for everyone was by definition good for anyone. But the converse does not hold. What...
Motor scooters appeared on the scene—in France and especially Italy, where the first national motor-scooter rally, held in Rome on November 13th 1949, was followed by an explosive growth in the market...
More than anything else, the welfare states of the mid-20th century established the profound indecency of defining civic status as a function of economic good fortune.
Marxism was the rhetorical awning under which very different dissenting styles could be gathered together—not least because it offered an illusory continuity with an earlier radical generation. But un...
Many of its cities—particularly the smaller ones at the intersection of old and new imperial boundaries, such as Trieste, Sarajevo, Salonika, Cernovitz, Odessa or Vilna—were truly multicultural societ...
Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime labors. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another. And since the experience of...
It is, quite simply, humiliating.
However: the predictable consequence of the nanny state, even the post-ideological nanny state, was that for anyone who had grown up knowing nothing different it was the duty of the state to make good...