Happy birthday Thomas Sowell

 Happy 96th birthday to Professor Thomas Sowell, one of the greatest thinkers of our time.

"Thomas Sowell is 96 years old, and the man has spent seven of those decades teaching the same lesson the political class refuses to learn: there are no solutions, only trade-offs. 

"He started as a Marxist. Worked in the federal government in 1960, studying minimum wage policy in Puerto Rico. The data told him what the textbooks would not: when you raise the price of labor by law, you price the least-skilled workers out of a job. His government colleagues cared more about protecting the programme than protecting the workers. That killed his faith in central planning faster than any theory. 

"Read 'Knowledge and Decisions' (1980) and you get the whole architecture of his thought. Prices carry information. No planner in Washington, however credentialed, can gather what millions of buyers and sellers signal every second through their bids and refusals. Hayek made this point in his 1945 paper on the use of knowledge in society. Sowell took it and built an entire method around it, applying it to housing, education, race, crime, and the endless parade of 'compassionate' schemes that reliably wreck the people they claim to rescue. Rent control empties buildings. Occupational licensing locks the poor out of trades. Sowell documented every one of these disasters with numbers, not slogans. 

"You want the sharpest example? Look at his work on race and economics. He showed that black Americans made faster gains in employment and income in the decades before the great expansion of the welfare state than after it. The programs sold as help became a ceiling. He said it plainly when saying it plainly cost him invitations to every respectable dinner party in the country. He never flinched. He wrote another column instead and another book, well into his nineties. 

"This man never mistook good intentions for good results. Go read him. You will emerge harder to fool."

~ Handre

Lies, Damn Lies, and the History of Capitalism

Modern historians have rarely told the truth about the history of capitalism, especially about the early days of the Industrial Revolution. In this Guest Post, Wanjiru Njoya reckons it's time to set the record straight...

Lies, Damn Lies, and the History of Capitalism
by Wanjiru Njoya

Mark Twain popularised the phrase, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.” It could equally well be adapted to depict the role of socialist narratives taught as “history”—narratives that wreak even more economic havoc than outright lies. Lies can be debunked with facts, but socialist narratives appeal to political and moral ideologies that are less easily dislodged once they take root.

The socialist view of economic history teaches that capitalism is based on exploiting the poor. It alleges that Western nations are rich due to colonising the Third World. As the economist Peter Bauer observed:

The principal assumption behind the idea of Western responsibility for Third World poverty is that the prosperity of individuals and societies generally reflects the exploitation of others.

The industrial revolution is said to have been powered by theft from poor countries, with white nations acquiring wealth by subjugating other races. Bauer details the essential facts proving these beliefs to be false. He also identifies some of the reasons why these types of anti-capitalist narratives are so influential, arguing that “acceptance of emphatic routine allegations that the West is responsible for Third World poverty reflects and reinforces Western feelings of guilt.”

These guilt narratives, which masquerade as “historical facts,” are more pernicious and more difficult to defeat than blatant lies because, much like statistics, they are assumed to be objective and factual—even when they bear no relationship to the truth. Bauer describes them as “not only untrue, but more nearly the opposite of the truth.”

These myths have fed the prevailing tendency to view “capitalism” as a catch-all phrase denoting cruelty to the less fortunate. In his book Capitalism and the Historians, Hayek explains that this hostile view of capitalism is based on false history:

Who has not heard of the “horrors of early capitalism” and gained the impression that the advent of this system brought untold new suffering to large classes who before were tolerably content and comfortable? We might justly hold in disrepute a system to which the blame attached that even for a time it worsened the position of the poorest and most numerous class of the population. The widespread emotional aversion to “capitalism” is closely connected with this belief that the undeniable growth of wealth which the competitive order has produced was purchased at the price of depressing the standard of life of the weakest elements of society.

That this was the case was at one time indeed widely taught by economic historians.

Hayek argued that despite the “thorough refutation of this belief,” it has not lost its influence—“Yet, a generation after the controversy has been decided, popular opinion still continues as though the older belief had been true.” He warned that this “socialist interpretation of history,” and in particular economic history, had “governed political thinking for the last two or three generations.” Like Bauer, he emphasised that it has no basis in truth:

Most people would be greatly surprised to learn that most of what they believe about these subjects are not safely established facts but myths, launched from political motifs and then spread by people of good will into whose general beliefs they fitted. . . most of what is commonly believed on these questions, not merely by radicals but also by many conservatives, is not history but political legend.

These political legends are depicted as merely descriptive of historical reality. Hayek attributed this in part to the claim of some historians to be objective:

One reason for this probably is the pretension of many modern historians to be purely scientific and completely free from all political prejudice. . . . There is indeed no legitimate reason why, in answering questions of fact, historians of different political opinions should not be able to agree. But at the very beginning, in deciding which questions are worth asking, individual value judgments are bound to come in.

Lacking a huge amount of time for independent study, many people rely on historians for factual analysis. When professional historians push their ideology over as “history” their readers are often none the wiser. Hayek saw this as a major reason why socialist ideology had become entrenched:

The remarkable thing about this [socialist] view is that most of the assertions to which it has given the status of “facts which everybody knows” have long been proved not to have been facts at all; yet they still continue, outside the circle of professional economic historians, to be almost universally accepted as the basis for the estimate of the existing economic order.

Why are false claims that have “long been proved not to have been facts at all” still taught as historical reality? It is not necessarily because socialist historians deliberately try to promote their own ideology—although that is sometimes the case. The more serious issue is failure to appreciate that interpretation of history requires selection and interpretation. As Hayek put it, value judgments necessarily influence historical interpretation:

And it is more than doubtful whether a connected history of a period or a set of events could be written without interpreting these in the light, not only of theories about the interconnection of social processes, but also of definite values—or at least whether such a history would be worth reading.

Further, the dissemination of historical narratives is not confined to formal study. When a historical narrative is dominant, in the manner described by Hayek, it is embedded as part of the general culture and generally accepted as being “obviously true.”

. . . it is via the novel and the newspaper, the cinema and political speeches, and ultimately the school and common talk that the ordinary person acquires his conceptions of history. But in the end even those who never read a book and probably have never heard of the names of the historians whose views have influenced them come to see the past through their spectacles.

Hayek emphasised the importance of getting the facts right, as “we can hardly hope to profit from past experience unless the facts from which we draw our conclusions are correct.” And one could certainly provide the detractors of capitalism with the facts about productivity and economic progress. Bauer’s work on economic development is a great resource for that purpose.

But it is not a simple matter of presenting the facts. Given people’s prior understanding of what they assume to be meant by “capitalism,” which reflects the commonly accepted narratives, any defense of capitalism merely reinforces their moral and ideological objection. Such defenses seem to be saying “yes, the rich brutally exploit the poor, but it’s worth it.”

To illustrate this point, take the example of Bauer’s observation that colonialism in fact introduced economic progress. He explained:

In the early 1890s there were in the Gold Coast no railways or roads, but only a few jungle paths. Transport of goods was by human porterage or canoe. By the 1930s there were railways and good roads; journeys by road required fewer hours than they had required days in 1890. In British West Africa public security and health improved out of all recognition over the period. Peaceful travel became possible; slavery, slave trading and famine were practically eliminated, and the incidence of the worst diseases greatly reduced.

You would expect that to settle the matter for anyone who is genuinely concerned with the facts. But, on the contrary, socialists respond with yet more mockery —“just because you built railroads does not mean colonial brutality was acceptable.” They miss the point entirely, because they cling to their erroneous view of what capitalism is in the first place. Propaganda is based on false ideology and cannot be displaced by highlighting the facts. The underlying ideology itself must be countered: pointing out that capitalism itself is the only system allowing wealth and riches to be attained without exploitation, that the trader principle of capitalism allows each party a win-win, and that it is the only political system protecting an individual's rights.

Nor is it enough to inform people of the correct definition of capitalism, because socialist ideology cannot be displaced by semantic debates. Rather than merely informing socialists that they do not understand what “real” capitalism is, it is necessary also to defeat the underlying ideology, by defending the foundational principles of civilisation—private property, individual liberty, voluntary exchange, and limited government.

* * * * 

Dr. Wanjiru Njoya is the Walter E. Williams Research Fellow for the Mises Institute, and the author of Economic Freedom and Social Justice (2021), Redressing Historical Injustice (2023), “You Stole Our Land: Common Law, Private Property, and Rothbardian Principles of Justice” (2024) and “Individual Liberty, Formal Equality, and the Rule of Law.”
    Dr. Njoya earned her Ph.D. in Law from the University of Cambridge (UK) and taught law for over 20 years at a number of UK universities, including the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics.

    Her article previously appeared at the Mises blog.

Nicola Orwell [updated]

Over the weekend, we were watching the recent George Orwell doco Orwell 2+2=5 on DocPlay. Worth it, except to the extent it (deliberately?) confuses economic power with political power -- the very important distinction, as Harry Binswanger explains, between, the Dollar & the Gun. (And the film's own language does get somewhat Orwellian itself towards the end.)

Anyway, two quotes from the great man came to mind as I read Finance Minister Nicola Willis attempting to explain why her government spending more is nonetheless a 'saving.'

"What [her] Government has largely done,"explains Luke Malpass, "is to cut in some areas to fund increases in others." In her words:

It is not a saving in the sense that we are spending less as a government; it is a saving in the sense that, in the absence of making those savings, we would not have been able to fund increases to health and education and essential services without borrowing more.

As Orwell writes:

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

And:

When one hears a politician using a word like 'socialist,' 'communism,' 'freedom,' 'patriotic,' 'realistic,' 'justice,' and the like, one is not sure what he is saying, but it is clear that he is not saying anything meaningful.

Add to that last one the word 'saving.'

1984 was not supposed to be an instruction book; it was supposed to be a warning.

Look! Look! Come see how much 'saving' Nicola has been doing year on year! 

[Source: NZ Treasury's official Financial Statements]

UPDATE: To put some more context into what Willis's 'savings' look like, here's Matthew Horncastle, who's been reading the NZ Govt's Financial Statements, which say that last year, Willis's government took in $169.8 billion in revenue.

The majority of that is taxes. Forced. Compulsory. Taken from working people, business owners, and families under threat of legal consequence. There is no opt out. 

    They spent $183.5 billion. That is $13.7 billion more than they collected. 

    Net government debt is now $182.2 billion. That is $140,000 for every household in New Zealand. The interest bill alone is $8.9 billion a year. Every single year. That is more than the entire budget for law and order. More than defence. More than housing. Just interest. Just the cost of the debt that already exists. 

    And debt is still growing. In 2019 net Crown debt was $58 billion. It is now $182 billion. In six years the government tripled the national debt and handed every New Zealand household a $140,000 bill they never agreed to. 

    That is not governance. That is generational theft. 

    Free people should not be working to service the borrowing habits of politicians who will never personally bear the consequences of what they have spent. 

    Get the books back to surplus. Cut spending. Stop borrowing. Let productive people keep more of what they earn.
    This is not complicated. It just requires the courage to do it.

"And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley."

"Q: 'So I want to ask you about Philistines and how Philistines have taken over the culture. I think the phrase you used is ‘Philistine supremacy’?'

"A: 'That's right. A lot of the time, when we talk about Philistines, we mean, oh, that awful person I know who doesn't appreciate the high arts. And it's a kind of snob thing. I'm not interested in that. Everyone's a Philistine, right? I'm a Philistine. You're a Philistine.

"'The really important thing is whether the literary elite are Philistines. And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley. And the guy who runs the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't think it's a problem. And there are just so many examples like that—that sort of suggest that the elite tier has kind of given up on being elites in a way.

"'I think part of it is we had what was called prestige TV, and people wanted to write about that and talk about that.'

"Q: 'Let me play Devil’s Advocate for a moment and say, no, 'Succession' is really good. The writing is very interesting. The cinematography adds a new layer to its presentation. The storytelling's good. It gives you room to explore various themes in a way that a play doesn’t because of its runtime and multi-season arc. Tell me why that’s crazy.'

"A: 'There are two questions here. Is Succession good? And is Succession the sort of thing that merits the cultural elite giving it the kind of attention that they have? And those are separate questions.

"'Maybe Succession is good. I neither know nor care. I found it boring. I couldn't watch very much of it. Personally, I think the cinematography is hugely derivative. ... But should we be talking about it in partnership with King Lear? Should we be devoting the kind of space and the kind of critical attention that we give to it, that we also give to the great works of fiction and drama? That’s obviously a no. Even the advocates can't really make a serious case for it. And, you know, King Lear is 400 years old at this point and is acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of the West. No one's printing out the Succession scripts and doing a close reading. ...'

"Q: 'What would you do specifically about Shakespeare?'

"A: 'So the first thing I would say is, you’re not at school and you’re not that person anymore. And there are a lot of things you did and didn’t like at school that are no longer relevant. So just move on. Put that to one side. That’s over. Shakespeare’s the best. People get a little fussy about, can we say the best, and can we have rankings? Whatever. Yes, he’s the best. He’s the heart of the English canon. He’s the best reading experience you can have. You owe it to yourself to see or read some Shakespeare in the way that you would travel to see amazing landscapes, amazing buildings, have the best food of the world, hear the best music of the world. No one thinks it’s crazy to jump on a plane for eight hours to go and do something incredible on the other side of the world. But spending three hours with this book is too scary?'"

~ from an interview with Henry Oliver on developing literary taste in an age of TV binge-watching and dumbed-down mass culture: 'How to Be a Serious Reader'

"Globalisation encourages the capitalist engine of growth."

"Globalisation encourages the capitalist engine of growth. If people understood how generous that engine has been they would have less enthusiasm for protectionism or socialism or environmentalist or economic nationalism in any of their varied forms. Most educated people believe that the gains to income from capitalism’s triumph have been modest, that the poor have been left behind, that the Third World (should we start calling it the Second?) has been immiserised in aid of the First, that population growth must be controlled, that diminishing returns on the whole has been the main force in world economic history since 1800. All these notions are factually erroneous. But you’ll find all of them in the mind of the average professor of political philosophy."

~ Deirdre McCloskey from her review of Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree and John Gray’s False Dawn

Freedom is a nation's greatest resource

 "Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free."

~ Montesquieu from his 1748 book The Spirit of Law [hat tip FEE]

"Too often ‘multiculturalism’ is mistaken for ‘multiracialism'"

"Too often ‘multiculturalism’ is mistaken for ‘multiracialism,’ when the two could not be more different. A multiracial society is one in which people of all races are able to coexist together in peace and cooperation as equal citizens under the law. A multicultural society is one in which people are encouraged to ghettoise themselves according to national or cultural identity."

~ Andrew Doyle from his book The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution [hat tip Gary Judd]

Thank you Adam Smith

It's a busy week. This week also marks the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, the first in-depth exploration and explanation of (in PJ O'Rourke's words) why some nations are prosperous and wealthy and other places just suck.In honour of the anniversary, here are several of Adam Smith’s most insightful observations:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book I, Chapter II]

It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book I, Chapter I]

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. [Lecture in 1755, quoted in Dugald Stewart, Account Of The Life And Writings Of Adam Smith LLD, Section IV, 25]

It is the maxim of every prudent master of a family, never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make than to buy. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book IV Chapter I]

By means of glasses, hotbeds, and hotwalls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of them at about thirty times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries. Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of claret and burgundy in Scotland? [The Wealth Of Nations, Book IV, Chapter II]

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book IV Chapter VIII]

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices…. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book IV Chapter VIII]

To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers…The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution... It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book I, Chapter XI]

It is the highest impertinence and presumption… in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense... They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book II, Chapter III]

There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book V Chapter II Part II] 

Every individual... neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it... he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.
    Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book IV, Chapter II]

What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. [The Wealth Of Nations, Book I Chapter VIII]

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent. [From his 1759 work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments]

The man of system…is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it… He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. [The Theory Of Moral Sentiments, Part VI, Section II, Chapter II]

Focus

“If we look at history, it always will speed up. So that’s why I think the skill of focus, being able to know how to focus when it's necessary, I think is a very, very valuable skill to have nowadays.”

~ Oscar de Bos, co-author of a new book Focus On-Off

BOOK REVIEW: 'Who Was Behind the Bolshevik Revolution?' by Ron Asher [updated with reply by publisher]

I have in front of me a new book by Tross Publishing, which I have been invited to review. Having written a chapter or two for the publisher, it is my unpleasant job not just to recommend you not buy it, but that the publisher withdraw it. (Recommending withdrawal is not a matter of "free speech" -- the right to speak includes the right to take the consequences, including criticism -- simply a recommendation for good editorial hygiene.) Withdraw, because it sits poorly with his other titles, because it sits badly with genuine scholarship on any subject. ...

... and because it's not even a good read.

In 1917 in the midst of a war for survival on the First World War's eastern front, Bolshevists seized power from a provisional Russian government fighting the war, and proceeded to enact terror on the population and thereafter on the world. Far from a revolution, it was a squalid little coup, and what came of it was disaster, starvation, death, and mass-murder. 

There had been a revolution that swept away the Tsar -- swept away him and his autocratic regime -- what Ayn Rand was to call "the good revolution." But it wasn't the Bolsheviks who revolted against the Tsar's regime; they came to power instead in a squalid little backdoor coup eight months later -- orchestrated in part by the Imperial German High Command, who had sent Lenin into Russia to kill the war on their terms -- a backroom revolt that stabbed in the back the Provisional Government and squashed like a bug Russia's first stumbling chance at real freedom. 

The Bolsheviks didn't sweep away oppression; they brought it back.

And our friend Mr Asher has now written 93 pages (and 5 pages of notes) to tell us who really did it. And oddly, the important wartime context is never mentioned ...

The wartime context of the coup. (From Louis Fischer's

 The Life of Lenin (NY: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 109

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT WAS SUPPOSED TO have said that "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."

This short book claims to reveal who was really behind the Bolshevik Revolution. Really and truly. And it will do so, we are promised, "with meticulous care and references" [p. 5; all uncredited page notes will refer to Mr Asher (2026)]. Take careful note: This is not a book about the ideas that caused the event in question. It is about the people. And, spoiler alert, our author says it was the Jews wot dunnit. They were driven to it, says the author, because they were Jews. 

That's it. That really is it.

And note the argument: it wasn't that those who driven to it because they happened to be Jews. They were driven to it because they were Jews. It was "vengeance," says our author, for earlier Russian pogroms against Jews. Or just because their religion was weird. Or ... something.

A remarkable claim, not least because head Bolshevik and the revolution's driving force was one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who was not at all Jewish. (He was raised in a Russian Orthodox Christian family, baptised as an infant, and identified culturally and ethnically as Russian; historians who have examined distant links, such as the author of Lenin's Jewish Question, emphasise any link was irrelevant to his identity, ideology, or actions: he critiqued all religion, including Judaism, and saw ethnicity as secondary to class struggle). Nor was Lenin's successor known as Stalin any more Jewish (he was, famously, an ethnic Georgian christened as Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili), and nor was the head of Lenin's feared secret police, the Cheka (the brutal Feliz Dzerzhinsky, who was a Pole). 

None of the heads of the snake were Jewish.

Indeed, of the 21 members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in August 1917, there were at most just six who could be categorised that way. Such niceties however do not disturb our author. (Indeed, he adds three more, without any reference for doing so.) 

And in any case.a similar ethnic make-up can be found for many other Russian movements of the time, including the Russian Orthodox priesthood, the rival Menshevik party (whose founders were both Jewish, and which actually had double the proportion of ethnic Jews to the Bolshies), and of course the Jewish Bund (a secular Jewish socialist party active between 1897 and 1920). A similar make-up can be found because any intellectual movement attracts intellectuals -- and Jewish Russians were among the most educated of the time, and were barred by the Tsar's regime from other political involvement.

So the claim is not just remarkable for being bold, but also (as we will see) for lacking the kind of "meticulous care and references" the boldness demands. It's true that historians of the various Russian revolutions and coups d'etat have generally recognised that Jews were represented in early Bolshevik leadership, but so were many other educated ethnic minorities who all faced persecution under the Tsar. (Most of whom were excluded by being non-Russian from advancement in Russian culture or in the vast Russian bureaucracy.) And of course the vast majority of Jews were not Bolsheviks, and Jews as a community suffered enormously under Soviet rule.

This is especially important today to understand. The book comes at a time when ethnic Russian fascism and anti-Semitism has escalated dramatically following Putin's insane aspirations for empire, and Hamas's murderous October 7 attack followed by Israel's bloody response. It's said that Hamas's “Sinwar placed his money on the 2,000-year belief that Jews were inherently vengeful, greedy, and lustful for the blood of innocents and children [and] in betting on Jew-hatred, Sinwar hit the jackpot."  

The irrational hatred continues even here in New Zealand, once considered a relatively safe environment for Jewish folk, and yet the NZ Jewish Council recorded 227 antisemitic incidents in the 12 months following October 7 -- more than the 166 recorded across the entire eight-and-a-half years prior.

So things are ramping up, and you might well ask yourself about such a book's publication: "Why now?" 

And about the thesis, even if proven: "So what?"

WHILE YOU PONDER THOSE QUESTIONS, consider again what such a proof might look like -- proof that it was the Jews wot dunnit -- and about that promise of "meticulous care and references." 

Let's begin by looking at some contemporary (or near-contemporary) quotes adduced by Mr Asher to describe the Bolshevik coup and the Jews' alleged responsibility for it: some examples drawn from a diplomat's alarmed despatch, a gossip columnist's interview, a White Russian general's memoir, and a State Department intelligence file drawing on a known forgery -- all of which are treated as equivalent historical evidence ...

Hitchen's Razor

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

~ Christopher Hitchens, from his 2007 book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Your library is like a wine cellar ...

“It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones. “There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion. 

“If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the ‘medicine closet’ and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That’s why you should always have a nutrition choice! 

"Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.”

~ attrib. Umberto Eco from discussion in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's 2007 book The Black Swan

"Don't get mad..."

"'Don't get mad,' Mr. James had told him. 'State your case --your facts and your reasons -- and don't raise your voice. You aren't going to win every time, that's just the way it'll be, but you should win more than you lose'."

~ Robert Gore from his 2013 novel The Golden Pinnacle

'Education Through Recreation'

"A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labour and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself he always seems to be doing both. Enough for him that he does it well."

~ Lawrence Pearsall Jacks from his 1932 book Education Through Recreation (pp 1-2)

Collectivism v Democracy

“It is now often said that democracy will not tolerate 'capitalism.' If 'capitalism' means here a competitive system based on free disposal over private property, it is far more important to realise that only within this system is democracy possible. When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.”

~ Friedrich Hayek from The Road to Serfdom, Ch. 5

Power politics from ancient Greece

"So many people quote the famous line from Thucydides—'The strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must'—and forget that the amoral imperialists who used that line in the end lost their war and their empire. 

    "Thucydides does not offer the line, 'The strong do what they can,' as a neutral analysis of how international affairs operate. He offers it as an expression of the reckless arrogance that brought about the destruction of the Athenian Empire."

~ David Frum

"Thucydides is often interpreted as the proponent of power politics .... However, again, a careful reading of the text reveals a deeper ambiguity. Is Thucydides genuinely teaching that might makes right or is he more interested in illustrating Athenian hubris or both?”

~ Franz-Stefan Gady from his article 'Hey Policy Wonks, This Is How You Should Read Thucydides'

The open society is the successful society

"The most secure and prosperous societies did not hide from the world. They were confident enough to remain open to trade and ideas, allowing the new to challenge the known. Progress emerges when people experiment, borrow, and combine ideas in ways no planner could ever foresee; decline happens when fear overcomes curiosity."

~ Johan Norberg from his article 'From Athens to the Abbasids to today’s Anglosphere, creativity and commerce drive greatness.' in which he explores the central lessons of history’s real golden ages in his new book, Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages.

The Seen & the Unseen — Dicey edition

 

"The beneficial effect of State intervention, especially in the form of legislation, is direct, immediate, and, so to speak, visible, whilst its evil effects are gradual and indirect, and lie out of sight. ... Hence the majority of mankind must almost of necessity look with undue favour upon governmental intervention. 

"This natural bias can be counteracted only by the existence, in a given society, ... of a presumption or prejudice in favour of individual liberty, that is, of laissez-faire. The mere decline, therefore, of faith in self-help — and that such a decline has taken place is certain —is of itself sufficient to account for the growth of legislation tending towards socialism."

~ AV Dicey from his lecture 'The Growth of Collectivism,' collected in his 1905 book 'Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century'

"This pathetic and muddled belief in the power of credit to cure all economic ills is perennial in New Zealand"

With all the talk this week of how the cheap credit of a a dirt-cheap OCR announcement filtering through to the economy, as if some wand had been waved we should all celebrate, I couldn't help thinking of NZ economist JB Condliffe's sage observation on the New Zealander's enthusiasm for cheap money:

"Still belief  persisted in the magic of credit to achieve all economic objectives. ... This pathetic and muddled belief in the power of credit to cure all economic ills is perennial in New Zealand ... "

He wrote that in 1959 in his book The Welfare State in New Zealand. 

I doubt he'd be surprised today.

“‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded"

“‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded — and once they are suspended it is not difficult for anyone who has assumed such emergency powers to see to it that the emergency will persist." 

~ Friedrich Hayek, from his 1979 book Law, Legislation & Liberty, Vol III: The Political Order of a Free People