"In February 1790, caught up in an obscure argument over a legal issue that had resulted in an accusation of bad faith, he produced a pamphlet lambasting the 'friends of despotism and aristocracy' who 'apply themselves with indefatigable confidence to renewing their fatal plots,' and connecting his own actions to a context in which 'at the heart of this capital the horrible secret of the most cowardly and the most extravagant conspiracy that venality and tyranny has ever woven against the patrie and liberty begins to emerge.' At the end of that year he responded to praise from the patriots of Avignon, in the context of their violent struggle for integration into the patrie, by calling their language 'the most flattering prize of my attachment to their cause and that of humanity.' In defending them, 'it is justice, it is liberty, it is my patrie, it is myself that I have defended.' After a further page of such effusion, he concluded that 'the happiness of the people of Avignon would be proportional to their magnanimity, if my power equaled my zeal for their interests, and the tender veneration that I have pledged to them.' Whatever else Robespierre may be said to be doing in such passages, he is certainly fashioning a self in which this particularly melodramatic form of sentimental identification is to the fore." David Andress "The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups." Henry Hazlitt "Predatory crime does not merely victimize individuals, it impedes and, in the extreme case, prevents the formation and maintenance of community. By disrupting the delicate nexus of ties, formal and informal, by which we are linked with our neighbours, crime atomizes society and makes of its members mere individual calculators estimating their own advantage, especially their chances of survival amidst their fellows. Common undertakings become difficult or impossible, except for those motivated by a shared desire for protection." James Quinn Wilson "Every new killing was excused on the grounds that we were building a remarkable 'new' world in which there would be no more violence, and that no sacrifice was too great for it. Nobody noticed that the end had begun to justify the means, and then, as always, gradually been lost sight of. It was the people of the twenties who first began to make a neat distinction between the sheep and the goats, between 'us' and 'them,' between upholders of the 'new' and those still mindful of the basic rules that governed human relations in the past." Nadezhda Mandelstam "The tempo of violence seems to have speeded up, the result, more or less direct, of change in the technology of communications, which now communicate not simply the fact but also the spirit of violent events, and do so instantaneously. More ominously, there appears to have been a legitimation of violence, and a spread of its ethos to levels of society that have traditionally seen themselves, and have been, the repositories of stability and respect for, insistence upon, due process. It is one thing to loot clothing stores—Brooks Brothers was hit in 1863—to fight with the police, to seize sections of the city and hold out against them. It is another thing to seize university libraries, and that is very much part of the violence of our time, a violence that arises not only among the poor and disinherited, but also among the well-to-do and privileged, with the special fact that those elements in society which normally set standards of conduct for the society as a whole have been peculiarly unwilling, even unable, to protest the massive disorders of recent times." Daniel Patrick Moynihan "We make choices and judgments every day. These choices are part of real experience. They are influenced by others, of course, but they are not fundamentally the result of a passive reaction to authority. And we know that one of the realest experiences in cultural life is that of inequality between books and musical performances and paintings and other works of art. Some things do strike us as better than others—more articulate, more radiant with consciousness. We may have difficulty saying why, but the experience remains. The pleasure principle is enormously important in art, and those who would like to see it downgraded in favor of ideological utterance remind one of the English Puritans who opposed bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators." Robert Hughes "The politically addicted are weird. They're not representative of America. And yet increasingly, all of Washington, D.C., is captured by the tiny, tiny, tiny little slice of highly online people who presume that other weirdos who put politics at the center of their worldview are normal." Ben Sasse "In 1921, the final report of the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs dealt Roosevelt a stunning rebuke for his role in the Newport sex scandal. His office, it declared, had violated 'the moral code of the American citizen, and the rights of every American boy who enlisted in the Navy to fight for his country.' As to Roosevelt himself, it judged his 'direct supervision' to be 'morally responsible' for the use of entrapment and other 'immoral acts.' More devastating, the committee suggested that Roosevelt was unfit to hold any public office. The front-page headline of the New York Times on July 23, 1921, was clear in assigning blame: 'Lay Navy Scandal to F.D. Roosevelt—Details Are Unprintable.'" David Beito "No one who is steeped in Roman history can watch Coppola's film or read Puzo's novel without being reminded of the role played by friendship (amicitia) and what we now call 'patronage' in the public life of ancient Rome. Amerigo Bonasera wants to confine his relationship with Vito Corleone to the contractual realm: he wants to pay up front for services rendered; he wants to retain his freedom and autonomy, the independence required of a 'good citizen'; he wants to remain at a distance from the man about to act on his behalf; he has no desire to incur a moral obligation, for he recognizes all too well that obligations of this sort can be crippling. Keeping a distance and retaining one's independence is part of what it means to be 'a good American.' This much this immigrant from the old world to the new can ascertain." Paul Rahe "For many years the technical task of devising plans for regulating our complex economic interests was too difficult to attempt. But today we know that this is no longer true, for Russia has shown that planning is practicable." Rexford Tugwell "Rejecting authority in regard to knowledge was not just a matter of abstract analysis. It was a necessary condition for progress, because, before the Enlightenment, it was generally believed that everything important that was knowable had already been discovered, and was enshrined in authoritative sources such as ancient writings and traditional assumptions. Some of those sources did contain some genuine knowledge, but it was entrenched in the form of dogmas along with many falsehoods. So the situation was that all the sources from which it was generally believed knowledge came actually knew very little, and were mistaken about most of the things that they claimed to know. And therefore progress depended on learning how to reject their authority. This is why the Royal Society (one of the earliest scientific academies, founded in London in 1660) took as its motto 'Nullius in verba,' which means something like 'Take no one's word for it.'" David Deutsch "The massive improvements in human welfare—better housing, better nutrition, better sanitation and better medicine—over the past 200 years are the result of economic growth and the learning, spending, innovation and political empowerment it has permitted. But at what point should it stop? In other words, at what point do governments decide that the marginal costs of further growth exceed the marginal benefits? Most of them have no answer to this question. Growth must continue, for good or ill. It seems to me that in the rich nations we have already reached the logical place to stop." George Monbiot "How did we know what states of mind were good? This was a matter of direct inspection, of direct unanalysable intuition about which it was useless and impossible to argue. In that case who was right when there was a difference of opinion? There were two possible explanations. It might be that the two parties were not really talking about the same thing, that they were not bringing their intuitions to bear on precisely the same object, and, by virtue of the principle of organic unity, a very small difference in the object might make a very big difference in the result. Or it might be that some people had an acuter sense of judgment, just as some people can judge a vintage port and others cannot. On the whole, so far as I remember, this explanation prevailed. In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility. Moore at this time was a master of this method—greeting one's remarks with a gasp of incredulity—Do you really think that, an expression of face as if to hear such a thing said reduced him to a state of wonder verging on imbecility, with his mouth wide open and wagging his head in the negative so violently that his hair shook." John Maynard Keynes "Many New Deal agencies, the famous 'alphabet soup,' were mostly continuations of various boards and committees set up fifteen years earlier during the war. The National Recovery Administration was explicitly modeled on the War Industries Board of World War I. The Securities and Exchange Commission was an extension of the Capital Issues Committee of the Federal Reserve Board. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was an updated version of the War Finance Corporation. FDR's public housing initiative was run by the architect of World War I-era housing policies. During the war, public housing had been a necessity for war laborers. Under FDR, everyone became in effect a war laborer." Jonah Goldberg "The President clearly did not understand what had happened to the recovery and was uncertain what to do. At this time he was receiving conflicting advice from many quarters. The conservatives were saying that the recession had been caused by the continued federal deficit (even though at that time the Federal Government was running a small cash surplus) and Morgenthau was influenced by their arguments. They also maintained that the undistributed profits tax was a factor and demanded its repeal. The President's faith in the basic New Deal policy of deliberately increasing a deficit to increase consumer buying power was obviously shaken. In any case, I always suspected that Roosevelt's adherence to that policy was based more on humanitarian than on economic grounds, despite his statements to the contrary that could be quoted. He was glad to use economic arguments for something he wanted to do on other grounds." Lauchlin Currie "The tool of politics (which frequently becomes its objective) is to extract resources from the general taxpayer with minimum offense and to distribute the proceeds among innumerable claimants in such a way as to maximize support at the polls. Politics, so far as mobilizing support is concerned, represents the art of calculated cheating—or more precisely how to cheat without being really caught." James Schlesinger "A 2019 article in Foreign Affairs by the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Ghebreyesus, was titled 'Climate Change Is Already Killing Us.' Yet the text doesn't deliver on the catchy title. Astoundingly, the article conflates deaths due to ambient and household air pollution (which cause an estimated 100 per 100,000 premature deaths each year, or about one-eighth of total deaths from all causes) with deaths due to human-induced climate change. The World Health Organization itself has said that indoor air pollution in poor countries—the result of cooking with wood and animal and crop waste—is the most serious environmental problem in the world, affecting up to three billion people. This is not the result of climate change. It's the result of poverty." Steven Koonin "In trade union bargaining, it would be unlawful for management to collude with a complicit workers group. In government bargaining, overt collusion is how the game is played. In exchange for huge union campaign support, politicians agree to give unions control over public operations and pensions. As unions like to say, 'we elect our own bosses.' At a rally with public unions, New Jersey's then-Governor Jon Corzine called out that 'We will fight for a fair contract!' Who was he going to fight? Collective bargaining with government unions is not a real negotiation. It's a pay-off." Philip Howard "Man is not born wise, rational and good, but has to be taught to become so. It is not our intellect that created our morals; rather, human interactions governed by our morals make possible the growth of reason and those capabilities associated with it." Friedrich Hayek "At inhuman speed we endured inhuman experiences, of which the Western world—and this includes Britain—still hasn't, or more accurately still fears to have, any real conception. And it is with a strange feeling that those of us who hail from the Soviet Union look upon today's West: as if we were neither neighbors on the same planet nor contemporaries, we contemplate the West from your future, or else look back at our own seventy-year-old past suddenly repeating itself. And what we see is still the same, still the same as then: the universal reverence of adult society for the opinion of children; the feverish infatuation, on the part of many young people, with vanishingly worthless ideas; the timorousness of professors to find themselves outside the latest trends; the failure of journalists to take responsibility for the words they fling so readily; the universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; the muteness of people with serious objections; the passive defeatism of the majority; the feebleness of governments and the paralysis of society's defense mechanisms; the spiritual dismay leading to political cataclysm." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn