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:
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
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.
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...
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...
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...
The center of gravity of political argument in the years after 1945 lay not between left and right but rather within the left: between communists and their sympathizers and the mainstream liberal-soci...
Margaret Thatcher’s notorious bon mot: there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and families.
Usually without giving the matter too much thought, we see ourselves as part of a civic community transcending generations.
The legacy of unregulated wealth creation is bitter indeed.
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...
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...
What an enormous longing for a new human order there was in the era between the world wars, and what a miserable failure to live up to it.’(Arthur Koestler)
Men like Hayek or von Mises seemed doomed to professional and cultural marginality. Only when the welfare states whose failure they had so sedulously predicted began to run into difficulties did they...
These days, we take pride in being tough enough to inflict pain on others.
La psicología, al fin y al cabo, y en este sentido guarda claras similitudes tanto con el marxismo como con la tradición judeocristiana, propone una narración de autoengaño, sufrimiento necesario, dec...
Whether capitalist economies thrive best under conditions of freedom is perhaps more of an open question than we like to think.
True, many radicals of the ’60s were quite enthusiastic supporters of imposed choices, but only when these affected distant peoples of whom they knew little.
Romanians, however, paid a terrible price for Ceauşescu’s privileged status. In 1966, to increase the population—a traditional ‘Romanianist’ obsession—he prohibited abortion for women under forty with...
We need to rediscover how to talk about change: how to imagine very different arrangements for ourselves, free of the dangerous cant of ‘revolution’.
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