Skip to main content

Charlie Gibbons's Library tagged political →  View Popular

07 May 09

Cafe Hayek: Brooks channels Hayek

  • Civic order in the classical liberal vision is a bottom up emergent order that takes advantage of knowledge that the top down engineering approach misses. This is true in pecuniary activity such as buying and selling but it's also true in non-pecuniary activity--who I want to associate with religiously or in my hobbies or how much time I have for my children or my parents. Freedom doesn't just mean the right to be selfish. It's the right to associate with whom I choose. The classical liberal prescription for the good life isn't about making as much money as possible. It's about the freedom to choose. It's about voluntary rather than coercive solutions, decentralized rather than centralized solutions, bottom-up emergent solutions that are the result of many actions and actors rather than top-down solutions by experts.
  • Freedom means that the government doesn't try to solve the problem of poverty, but rather it leaves the door open to voluntary community rather than coerced community.
  • 1 more annotations...

Op-Ed Columnist - The Long Voyage Home - NYTimes.com

  • What threatens Americans’ efforts to build orderly places to raise their kids? The answers would produce an agenda: the disruption caused by a boom and bust economy; the fragility of the American family; the explosion of public and private debt; the wild swings in energy costs; the fraying of the health care system; the segmentation of society and the way the ladders of social mobility seem to be dissolving.
  • Then they will have to explain that there are two theories of civic order. There is the liberal theory, in which teams of experts draw up plans to engineer order wherever problems arise. And there is the more conservative vision in which government sets certain rules, but mostly empowers the complex web of institutions in which the market is embedded.
08 Feb 09

Why I Am Not a Conservative by F. A. Hayek

  • Conservatism
    proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread
    attitude of opposition to drastic change.
  • Let me now
    state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism
    which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature
    it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are
    moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in
    slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate
    another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has,
    for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be
    dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between
    conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the
    direction, of contemporary developments. But, though there is a
    need for a "brake on the vehicle of progress,"
  • 14 more annotations...
28 Mar 07

Cato Unbound » Blog Archive » The Paradox of Libertarianism

  • The more wealth we have, the more government we can afford. Furthermore, the better government operates, the more government people will demand. That is the fundamental paradox of libertarianism.
  • The old formulas were “big government is bad” and “liberty is good,” but these are not exactly equal in their implications. The second motto — “liberty is good” — is the more important. And the older story of “big government crushes liberty” is being superseded by “advances in liberty bring bigger government.”
  • 1 more annotations...
1 - 18 of 18
Showing 20▼ items per page

Selected Tags

Related Tags

Sponsored Links

Ads by Google

Highlighter, Sticky notes, Tagging, Groups and Network: integrated suite dramatically boosting research productivity. Learn more »

Join Diigo