Sublime

But it is possible to create a society in which everybody is given not equal rewards, but equal opportunities, and where rewards vary not in accordance with the ownership of property, but with the worth of a person’s contribution to that society.

One is the neoclassical rational-choice-equilibrium argument that markets automatically come to the Pareto optimal equilibrium for society. This was Ken Arrow and Debreu’s great work. The second is more out of the Hayekian tradition, that markets are efficient at processing distributed information to help coordinate activity in the economy. But bot

Thus election could not be proved by theological learning at all.111 Hence Pietism, with a deep distrust of the Church of the theologians,112 to which—this is characteristic of it—it still belonged officially, began to gather the adherents of the praxis pietatis in conventicles removed from the world.

“Remember, that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides.

Impulsive enjoyment of life, which leads away both from work in a calling and from religion, was as such the enemy of rational asceticism, whether in the form of seigneurial sports, or the enjoyment of the dance-hall or the public-house of the common man.

The fewer people, the smaller, the less activity inside, the more nearly perfect is the organization in terms of its only reason for existence: the service to the environment.

Die demokratischen Gesellschaften haben Kasten und Stände abgeschafft und den Einzelnen durch die formale Gleichheit aller politische wie wirtschaftliche Wege zu sozialer Mobilität eröffnet. Im Prinzip, heißt das, ist ein sozialer Aufstieg jedem Menschen möglich, der sein Los verändern und verbessern möchte.

“Those who confuse entrepreneurship and management close their eyes to the economic problem…. The capitalist system is not a managerial system; it is an entrepreneurial system.” —Ludwig von Mises

What distinguished libertarians from mainstream pro-business Republicans—Mailer’s parade of delegates in Miami Beach—was their pure and uncompromising idea. What was it? Hayek: “Planning leads to dictatorship.” The purpose of government is to secure individual rights, little else.