ronically the system that recognized the permanence of human flaws, the Lockean influence on the American Constitution, has proven far less oppressive than the systems that believed in the malleability of human nature.
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We have taken a detour on Hayek’s Road to Serfdom; we have managed to cede more power to the central government while retaining much of the individualism of the Constitution. This is a unique outcome in political evolution attributed to the genius of the Constitution itself combined with a unique American political culture that shrouds it. At its best progressivism expanded the promise of political equality into the economic sphere, assuring equal economic opportunity if not results; at its worst it was seduced by the false confidence of the historicists shared by its technocratic sisters in Europe.
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” Contrary to a widespread impression among noneconomists, though, understanding the vocabulary of economics is not the same as understanding economics.”
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Keynes suggested the use of government to make more efficient allocations of capital but was often critical of the incompetence of government officials. He seems to unknowingly refute himself. The weak accountability in government action is what distinguishes it from market solutions. The worst solution is the pairing of select firms to partner with government actors. When the results fail capitalism is faulted, bur corporatism is not capitalism.
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These institutions were under full frontal assault in the Kavanaugh hearing. In desperation to preserve their most cherished right they dropped all pretenses of loyalty to the institutions that protect all of our rights. They are willing to sacrifice due process and the presumption of innocence to even the smallest threat to Roe v Wade.
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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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Reform is seductive. The faults of the status quo and our current institutions are vivid, magnified in an academic media complex that considers ‘viral’ an achievement. Reform is inchoate and illusive with faults yet to be recognized, presently clear only in the minds of critics and reactionaries. In the future these faults are the subject of history.
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“History does repeat itself, but the soundtrack is different, and the sequel is usually disappointing”. – HO
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From Deirdre McCloskey in Reason Magazine, The Myth of Technological Unemployment Helping the poverty-stricken is laudable. But we can’t subsidize 1.7 million people a month. Nor is job retraining a good idea when directed from above: The wise heads in Washington
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From Deirdre McCloskey in Reason Magazine, The Myth of Technological Unemployment In 1910, one out of 20 of the American workforce was on the railways. In the late 1940s, 350,000 manual telephone operators worked for AT&T alone. In the 1950s, elevator
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From Deirdre McCloskey in Reason Magazine, The Myth of Technological Unemployment When a Ford plant installed robots, Walter Reuther, a long-ago president of the United Auto Workers union, is said to have asked a manager: “How are you going to get
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from Sarah Hoyt, Poor Darlings: Back in the early twentieth century, when “scientific” everything was shiny and chrome, they were “scientific” governance. All that bs about semantics, and psychology as a hard science you find in early Heinlein books? Yep, that
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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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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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