Sublime

Putting these families squarely on track toward productive work required more than money. It required treating them as human beings with a respect they were not used to, recognizing both their potential and the damage done to them by years of deprivation.

The advance of human societies fundamentally requires that they continuously attain a balance between order and adaptability. Entrepreneurs are vital to the attainment and maintenance of prosperity because they are, by definition, the ones who push back against incumbent interests and, in so doing, maintain that balance.

Neoliberalism—a product mainly of the second half of the 20th century—emphasizes the beneficial consequences of competitive markets and personal advancement far more than the general nourishing of human well-being.

Good economic institutions will encourage citizens to invest, accumulate, and develop new technologies, as a result of which society will prosper.

As the author John Perkins spells out it’s a paradigm driven forward, ‘by a concept that has become accepted as gospel: the idea that all economic growth benefits humankind and that the greater the growth, the more widespread the benefits. This belief also has a corollary: that those people who excel at stoking the fires of economic growth should b

It is not enough to be granted the right not to be abused by our governments without the corresponding right to receive assistance; not enough to possess civil and political rights without social and economic ones as well.

Among the most powerful institutions for supporting good incentives are property rights, political stability, honest government, a dependable legal system, and competitive and open markets.

Rawls’s alternative, which he calls the difference principle, corrects for the unequal distribution of talents and endowments without handicapping the talented. How? Encourage the gifted to develop and exercise their talents, but with the understanding that the rewards these talents reap in the market belong to the community as a whole. Don’t handi