Sublime

The pursuit of wealth generally diverts men of great talents and of great passions from the pursuit of power, and it very frequently happens that a man does not undertake to direct the fortune of the State until he has discovered his incompetence to conduct his own affairs.

Primary instruction is within the reach of everybody; superior instruction is scarcely to be obtained by any.

Property is very prominent in Locke's political philosophy, and is, according to him, the chief reason for the institution of civil government: “The great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property; to which in the state of nature there are many things wanting.”

This history of neoliberalization and class formation, and the proliferating acceptance of the ideas of the Mont Pelerin Society as the ruling ideas of the time, makes for interesting reading when placed against the background of counter-arguments laid out by Karl Polanyi in 1944 (shortly before the Mont Pelerin Society was established). In a compl

The disastrous influence which popular authority may sometimes exercise upon the finances of a State was very clearly seen in some of the democratic republics of antiquity, in which the public treasure was exhausted in order to relieve indigent citizens, or to supply the games and theatrical amusements of the populace.

Other things being equal, the more widely dispersed key technologies are, the more widely dispersed power will tend to be, and the smaller the optimum scale of government.

Hayek gives us the intuition of prices conveying only what market participants deem to be the most important information and actually destroying the rest, and Holland shows how this can be represented with the formalism of complex systems.

A few examples include: Greed is good. Maximizing pleasure from consumption is the goal. A billion acts of selfishness will lead to a prosperous society. The social duty of business is just to maximize its profits. There’s no such thing as society, only individuals—that was Margaret Thatcher’s famous quote. Markets are efficient; other institutions