jonatanforsberg.net: On distinguishment and colonial fashion

Sunday, August 26, 2012

On distinguishment and colonial fashion

A problem with much contemporary parlance is that it does not differentiate the usage of the word "capitalists" enough. On one hand we have entrepreneurs, industrialists and merchants and on another complacent economic elites watching each other's backs, demanding the central banks to print money in order to secure something not lasting. The former ones are much needed to create wealth, which is necessary if you want welfare. The latter ones are an obstacle for the creative destruction needed to maintain wealth, which is necessary if you want welfare.

Some hundred years ago people in our part of the world starved ever so often. During industrialisation we built up riches and today, when much of the industry has moved elsewhere, many argue the case that we could keep the wealth without devoting a thought to industrial work. Somehow we should spend our time being knowledge-intensive, let others toil and get away with it. The morale seems to have vanished with the affluence. What is more, at parts the analysis seems rather colonial to yours truly.

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants"
(Sir Isaac Newton)

"you chose to act as if you had never been molded into civil society and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you."
(Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France)

"Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve"
(Sir Karl Popper)

Liberty is, of course, a loftier goal. But only those who have never known disorder fail to grasp that [order] is the necessary precondition for liberty."
(Niall Ferguson in Colossus)

"When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude."
(Theodore Dalrymple in What is Poverty?)

"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. // We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."
(Sir Karl Popper on the paradox of freedom in The Open Society and Its Enemies)

"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. // The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them."
(Thomas Sowell in Is Reality Optional?)

"Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop."

(G.K. Chesterton in Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State)

"to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress."
(The aim of The Economist)

"This is the lesson: Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy."
(Sir Winston Churchill, October 29th 1941, Harrow School , London)