The idea of ordinary people enjoying luxuries and "unnecessary" items has long troubled intellectuals and aristocrats. But thanks to capitalism, ordinary people can now enjoy the basic pleasures the ruling classes have long seized for their own.
Though he was generally a Ricardian, John Stuart Mill thought that the main obstacle to socialism is that people might not yet be civilized enough to put it into practice.
Murray Rothbard wrote, “The rate of interest is the price of ‘time.’” It’s safe to say the world’s central banks have manipulated and mispriced what time is worth.
“The General Theory was published in 1936 and Hayek decided not to respond directly. In making this decision, Hayek committed what many defenders of the free market system consider to be one of the major tactical errors of this century.”
Ideally, political elites would like nothing more than state-sponsored ethnic conflict. Having multiple groups pitted against each other in petty political squabbles makes effective opposition against the managerial class virtually impossible.
Yes, capitalism is more efficient than socialism, but to build a compelling argument for free market capitalism, defenders of liberty must also articulate that it is a superior moral system.
There are ominous signs on the horizon that governments want to move toward mandating "socially responsible investing" for pensions and fund managers. This is a terrible idea, to say the least.
