Nonetheless, he was sensitive not just to the need for countercyclical economic policies to head off future depression, but also to the prudential virtues of ‘the social security state’.
Insecurity breeds fear. And fear—fear of change, fear of
Even at their height, the Scandinavian welfare states left the economy to the private sector—which was then taxed at very high rates to pay for social, cultural and other services. What Swedes, Finns,...
Dissent and dissidence are overwhelmingly the work of the young. It is not by chance that the men and women who initiated the French Revolution, like the reformers and planners of the New Deal and pos...
Values such as these derived from longstanding religious or communitarian practices.
Usually without giving the matter too much thought, we see ourselves as part of a civic community transcending generations.
High taxation was not regarded in these years as an affront. On the contrary, steep rates of progressive income tax were seen as a consensual device to take excess resources away from the privileged
Whether capitalist economies thrive best under conditions of freedom is perhaps more of an open question than we like to think.
We have become insensible to the human costs of apparently rational social policies, especially when we are advised that they will contribute to overall prosperity and thus—implicitly—to our separate...
We face today two practical dilemmas. The first can be succinctly described as the return of the ‘social question’.
Until fairly recently it would only have been a slight exaggeration to say that most Norwegians, if they were not themselves farmers or fishermen, were their children.
Those who got the twentieth century right, whether in anticipation [..] or as contemporary observations, had to be able to imagine a world for which there was no precedent.
These days, we take pride in being tough enough to inflict pain on others.
The late Ralf Dahrendorf, an Anglo-German political scientist well placed to appreciate the scale of the changes he had seen in his lifetime, wrote of those optimistic years that [i]n many respects th...
Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest:
Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains...
Socialism for social democrats, especially in Scandinavia, was a distributive concept. It was about making sure that wealth and assets were not disproportionately gathered into the hands of a privileg...
Margaret Thatcher’s notorious bon mot: there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and families.
We lose faith not just in parliamentarians and congressmen, but in Parliament and Congress themselves.
The 20th century morality tale of ‘socialism vs. freedom’ or ‘communism vs. capitalism’ is misleading. Capitalism is not a political system; it is a form of economic life, compatible in practice with...