So what have Keynes’s ‘madmen in authority’ done with the ideas they inherited from defunct economists? They have set about dismantling the properly economic powers and initiatives of the state.
Shanghai—the term denotes people who have gathered together into affluent subdivisions of suburbs and cities and fondly suppose themselves functionally independent of the rest of society.
Markets do not automatically generate trust, cooperation or collective action for the common good. Quite the contrary: it is in the nature of economic competition that a participant who breaks the rul...
Inequality, then, is not just unattractive in itself; it clearly corresponds to pathological social problems that we cannot hope to address unless we attend to their underlying cause. There is a reaso...
In the years following 1945 it seemed to most intelligent observers as though the Austrians had made a simple category error. Like so many of their fellow refugees, they had assumed that the condition...
I prefer the edge: the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another—where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal c...
George Kennan, the American diplomat, described the scene in his memoirs: ‘The disaster that befell this area with the entry of the Soviet forces has no parallel in modern European experience. There w...
Broken eggs make good omelettes. But you cannot build a better society on broken men.
In the arena of economic policy, the citizens of today’s democracies have learned altogether too much modesty. We have been advised that these are matters for experts: that economics and its policy im...
Dějiny nacismu – a vůbec všech forem totalitarismu – nelze plně pochopit, pokud je omezíme na vyprávění o zlých lidech, kteří se vědomě a záměrně dopouštějí zločinů s cílem páchat zlo
Why do we experience such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society? Why is it beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage? Are we doomed indefinitely...
There were no disagreements in Stalin’s universe, only heresies; no critics, only enemies; no errors, only crimes. The trials served both to illustrate Stalin’s virtues and identify his enemies’ crime...
The most obvious symptom of the change came in the form of ‘planning’.
The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despite, or, at least, to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the c...
The democratic failure transcends national boundaries. The embarrassing fiasco of the Copenhagen climate conference of December 2009 is already translating into cynicism and despair among young people...
The chief shortcoming of the old public services was the restrictive regulations and facilities—one-size-fits-all—with
Over the past thirty years we have thrown all this away.
Our problem is to work out a social organization which shall be as efficient as possible without offending our notions of a satisfactory way of life. —JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES
Odjet do Španělska bojovat za republiku bylo nesmírně lákavé. Byl to způsob, jak se stát antifašistou, v atraktivním prostředí se zapojit do společnosti čelící velmi prostým dilematům.
Namísto abychom veřejně přiznali potřebu určitého společenského vybavení (muzeí, sportovišť, veřejné dopravy), vyhýbáme se nepopulárnímu danění tím, že podobné výdaje kryjeme z loterií – jichž se v di...