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What Corporatism Actually Is

by | Dec 24, 2024 | ,

"The fundamental idea both of guild socialism and of corporativism is that every branch of business forms a monopolistic body, the guild or corporazione. This entity enjoys full autonomy; it is free to settle all its internal affairs without interference of external factors and of people who are not themselves members of the guild. The mutual relations between the various guilds are settled by direct bargaining from guild to guild or by the decisions of a general assembly of the delegates of all guilds. In the regular course of affairs the government does not interfere at all. Only in...

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Good Plan Means My Plan

by | Dec 23, 2024 | ,

"All this passionate praise of the supereminence of government action is but a poor disguise for the individual interventionist’s self-deification. The great god State is a great god only because it is expected to do exclusively what the individual advocate of interventionism wants to see achieved. Only that plan is genuine which the individual planner fully approves. All other plans are simply counterfeit. In saying 'plan' what the author of a book on the benefits of planning has in mind is, of course, his own plan alone. He does not take into account the possibility that the plan which the...

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Who Needs What?

by | Dec 22, 2024 | ,

"[I]t is evident ... that the man, who first made himself clothes and built himself a cabin, supplied himself with things which he did not much want, since he had lived without them till then; and why should he not have been able to support in his riper years, the same kind of life, which he had supported from his infancy?" —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Equality "Under laissez faire, says the planner, it is not those goods which people 'really' need that are produced, but those goods from the sale of which the highest returns are expected. It is the objective of planning to direct...

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Whose Plan?

by | Dec 21, 2024 | ,

"The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is whose planning? Should each member of society plan for himself, or should a benevolent government alone plan for them all? The issue is not automatism versus conscious action; it is autonomous action of each individual versus the exclusive action of the government. It is freedom versus government omnipotence. "Laissez faire does not mean: Let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: Let each individual choose how he wants to cooperate in the social division of labor; let the consumers determine what the entrepreneurs should...

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What Full Liberalism Is Not About

by | Dec 20, 2024 | ,

"Liberalism is a doctrine directed entirely towards the conduct of men in this world. In the last analysis, it has nothing else in view than the advancement of their outward, material welfare and does not concern itself directly with their inner, spiritual and metaphysical needs. It does not promise men happiness and contentment, but only the most abundant possible satisfaction of all those desires that can be satisfied by the things of the outer world. "Liberalism has often been reproached for this purely external and materialistic attitude toward what is earthly and transitory. The life of...

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TGIF: The Unfortunately Forgotten Sumner

TGIF: The Unfortunately Forgotten Sumner

by | Dec 20, 2024 | , , , ,

Some things haven't changed since 1883. In that year Yale University professor William Graham Sumner, the anti-imperialist laissez-faire liberal and pioneer of American sociology, noticed that "we are told every day that great social problems stand before us and demand a solution, and we are assailed by oracles, threats, and warnings in reference to those problems." Then, as now, self-styled progressives announced that the sky would fall unless the problem that had most recently caught their fancy was addressed once by the government. Adam Smith's observation that "there is a great deal of...

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The Welfare-State Paradox

by | Dec 19, 2024 | , ,

"Whether ... a system of social security is a good or a bad policy is essentially a political problem. One may try to justify it by declaring that the wage earners lack the insight and the moral strength to provide spontaneously for their own future. But then it is not easy to silence the voices of those who ask whether it is not paradoxical to entrust the nation’s welfare to the decisions of voters whom the law itself considers incapable of managing their own affairs; whether it is not absurd to make those people supreme in the conduct of government who are manifestly in need of a guardian...

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The Steady Rise in Living Standards

by | Dec 18, 2024 | ,

"The history of capitalism as it has operated in the last two hundred years in the realm of Western civilization is the record of a steady rise in the wage earners’ standard of living. The inherent mark of capitalism is that it is mass production for mass consumption directed by the most energetic and far-sighted individuals, unflaggingly aiming at improvement. Its driving force is the profit-motive the instrumentality of which forces the businessman constantly to provide the consumers with more, better, and cheaper amenities. An excess of profits over losses can appear only in a progressing...

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What Social Animals Owe to Each Other

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