Socialism and its cousin, Progressivism, are not the forward-thinking ideologies they pretend, but regressions to the natural tendencies of man.
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The main problem, though, as I said, is that the insights of poets and taletellers and historians and philosophers from the beginning into what human man happiness actually is have simply been bypassed. “Happiness” viewed as self-reported mood is surely
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Admittedly, myopic pessimism, from the right or left, sells. The late Allan Bloom’s right-wing pessimism, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), sold half a million copies merely in hardback. Shortly afterward, at a little conference we both attended, Allan
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The concluding paragraphs of Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity- Why Economics Can’t Explain The Modern World: Yet innovation, even in a proper system of the virtues, has continued to be scorned by many of our opinion makers now for a century
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The clerisy’s anti-innovation and antimarket and antiliberty rhetoric in the years since 1848, though repeated down to yesterday, misapprehends the scientific history. The clerisy says that every spillover in the environment justifies world-governmental control. Scientific economics suggest that it does
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Look again at your own ancestors compared with your present condition. You are much better off, and have much more scope to pursue Bildung. Admittedly you don’t own a seventy-five-foot yacht. Too bad. Being an adult person of sense, however,
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The 24-hour news cycle and its ubiquitous media brings every detail of every issue and policy to us. Debates limit responses to critical issues to two minutes. Congressional hearings for cabinet nominees are similarly limited. This precious time is wasted
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Nor during the Age of Innovation have the poor gotten poorer, as people are always saying. On the contrary, the poor have been the chief beneficiaries of modern capitalism. It is an irrefutable historical finding, obscured by the logical truth
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from Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek (highly recommended) , a quote from Robert Higgs: Nothing has done more to render modern economic theory a sterile and irrelevant exercise in autoeroticism than its practitioners’ obsession with mathematical, general-equilibrium models. Not only
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Yet in the late nineteenth century the artists and the intellectuals-the “clerisy,” as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and I call it-turned against liberal innovation. The treason of the clerisy led in the twentieth century to the pathologies of nationalism and socialism
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