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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ae84678 | No market economy can function properly without the support of legal and moral sanctions, designed to hold individual agents to their bargains, and to return the cost of misbehaviour to the one who causes it. But | Roger Scruton | ||
| f975018 | Decisions are free when each of us settles his path through life by negotiation, playing his cards according to his own best judgement and without coercion from others. Traditional liberalism is the view that such a society is possible only if the individual members have sovereignty over their own lives - which means being free both to grant and to withhold consent respecting whatever relations may be proposed to them. Individual sovereignt.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 07391a6 | Even socialists steer away from any criticism of the real corporate predation, which is the predation on future generations in which we too are involved. Like | Roger Scruton | ||
| 3a8bc8f | Western democracies did not create the virtue of citizenship; on the contrary, they grew from it. Nothing is more evident in The Federalist than the public spirit that it puts in play, in opposition to factions, cabals and private scheming. As | Roger Scruton | ||
| f93f1e8 | The opportunity to live our lives as we will; the security of impartial law, through which our grievances are answered and our hurts restored; the protection of our environment as a shared asset, which cannot be seized or destroyed at the whim of powerful interests; the open and enquiring culture that has shaped our schools and universities; the democratic procedures that enable us to elect our representatives and to pass our own laws - the.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| fc8e32b | It is only when people have rights of property, and can freely exchange what they own for what they need, that a society of strangers can achieve economic coordination. Socialists | Roger Scruton | ||
| c0b799d | Oakeshott believed that civil association has been increasingly displaced by enterprise, under pressure from political elites, managers, parties and ideologues. It is not only socialists with their goals of equality and social justice who have contributed to this displacement. The liberal attempt to adopt the contours of an abstract and universal idea of justice and human rights; the supposedly conservative pursuit of economic growth as the.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 931dd76 | union', you at the same time license the would-be leaders. You give credentials to those who promise to guide society along its allotted path, and you confer on them the authority to conscript, dictate, organize and punish the rest of us, regardless of how we might otherwise wish to lead our lives. In particular, you authorize the invasion of those institutions and associations that form the heart of civil society, in order to impose on the.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 90b5fc4 | At the same time, instead of limiting the power of the state, alleged human rights have begun to enhance that power, and to bring the state into all our disputes on the side of the favoured party. Rights, | Roger Scruton | ||
| d24e525 | The long-term effect of this has been to open Western societies to immigration, and to impart an ideal of citizenship that, it is hoped, will enable people of disparate origins and backgrounds to live together, recognizing that the real source of their obligations lies not in that which divides them - race and religion in particular - but in that which unites them - territory, good government, the day-to-day routines of neighbourliness, the.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| d0d8b91 | The first is that the conservative cause has been polluted by the ideology of big business, by the global ambitions of the multinational companies, and by the ascendancy of economics in the thinking of modern politicians. Those factors have led conservatives to enter into alliance with people who regard the effort to conserve things as both futile and quaint. The second reason is that the truth in environmentalism has been obscured by the a.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 976f8d6 | Over a large range of cases, environmental problems arise from our entirely reasonable habit of taking the benefits of our activities, while passing on the costs. The environment is degraded because we externalize the costs of what we do; and the solution is to find the motives that will return the costs to the one who creates them. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 20d8f36 | this is to mistake the effect for the cause. In a free economy such ways of making money emerge by an invisible hand from choices made by all of us. It is the demand for cars, oil, cheap food and expendable luxuries that is the real cause of the industries that provide these things. Of | Roger Scruton | ||
| c338702 | The solution is to adjust our demands, so as to bear the costs of them ourselves, and to find the way to put pressure on businesses to do likewise. And | Roger Scruton | ||
| d627265 | The most interesting aspect of this culture of repudiation has been the attack on the central place accorded to reason in human affairs by the writers, philosophers and political theorists of the Enlightenment. The old | Roger Scruton | ||
| 493080d | we find the university dominated by theology of another kind - a godless theology, to be sure, but one no less insistent upon unquestioning submission to doctrine, and no less ardent in its pursuit of heretics, sceptics and debunkers. People are no longer burned at the stake for their views: they simply fail to get tenure, or, if they are students, they flunk the course. But the effect is similar, namely to reinforce an orthodoxy in which n.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| bc6dd58 | The Abbe Sieyes, in his inflammatory pamphlet, What is the Third Estate? of 1789, expressed the point succinctly. 'The nation is prior to everything. It is the source of everything. Its will is always legal ... The manner in which a nation exercises its will does not matter; the point is that it does exercise it; any procedure is adequate, and its will is always the supreme law.' Twenty | Roger Scruton | ||
| 5e5d32a | modern economies have developed ways of avoiding costs or passing them on that effectively remove the sanctions from dishonest or manipulative behaviour. The | Roger Scruton | ||
| d567fad | In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that self-interest can solve this problem. Given a free economy and an impartial rule of law, self-interest leads towards an optimal distribution of resources. Smith | Roger Scruton | ||
| 4f67dff | Smith emphasized that trust, responsibility and accountability exist only in a society that respects them, and only where the spontaneous fruit of human sympathy is allowed to ripen. It is where sympathy, duty and virtue achieve their proper place that self-interest leads, by an invisible hand, to a result that benefits everyone. | Roger Scruton | ||
| eda1a31 | In place of top-down government, Burke made the case for a society shaped from below, by traditions that have grown from our natural need to associate. The important social traditions are not just arbitrary customs, which might or might not have survived into the modern world. They are forms of knowledge. They contain the residues of many trials and errors, as people attempt to adjust their conduct to the conduct of others. To | Roger Scruton | ||
| 42f6ef7 | In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. These | Roger Scruton | ||
| c15b5ac | Conservatives believe in private property because they respect the autonomy of the individual. But it is fair to say that too many conservatives have failed to take seriously the many abuses to which property is subject. Libertarian | Roger Scruton | ||
| 6909211 | Spinoza left a celebrated description of his life's endeavour: After experience had taught me that all things which frequently take place in ordinary life are vain and futile; when I saw that all the things I feared and which feared me had nothing good or bad in them save in so far as the mind was affected by them, I determined at last to inquire whether there might be anything which might be truly good and able to communicate its goodness,.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 8ff1f3d | the market is the benign mechanism that Hayek and others describe only when it is constrained by an impartial rule of law, and only when all participants bear the costs of their actions as well as reaping the benefits. | Roger Scruton | ||
| b961e52 | Instead of the benign competition to secure a market share, we discover a malign competition to externalize costs. The firm that can transfer its costs to others has the advantage over the one that must meet its costs itself, and if the costs can be transferred so widely that it is impossible to identify a victim, they can be effectively written off. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 2b246b1 | Why do the defenders of the market not raise their voices against the practice of externalizing costs in that way? After | Roger Scruton | ||
| 1c1a5dc | The ease with which large producers can transfer their costs is the glaring abuse through which the market - otherwise one of the core values of conservatism - condemns itself. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 8705f62 | But the long-term result has been the emergence of a new managerial class, as the multinationals move in with their takeover bids, their legal privileges and their transnational lobbyists for whom small businesses and entrepreneurs are the enemy. Those who object to this new managerialism (and I am one of them) should nevertheless recognize that what is bad in it is precisely what was bad in the old corporatist economy that Thatcher set out.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 9d2d639 | society is not identical with the state. Society is composed of people, freely associating and forming communities of interest that socialists have no right to control and no authority to outlaw. To | Roger Scruton | ||
| 2923ef8 | I saw that this desire to control society in the name of equality expresses exactly the contempt for human freedom that I encountered in Eastern Europe. There | Roger Scruton | ||
| 50c34c5 | Observing the volatile nature of the new democracies, I came vividly to see how unimportant a part of democracy are elections, in comparison with the enduring institutions and public spirit that make elected politicians accountable. | Roger Scruton | ||
| bcebecf | But, because of the unwise provisions of the Treaty of Rome regarding freedom of movement, it has led to the mass emigration of the professional classes, and to the loss of the educated young from countries that stand desperately in need of them. The | Roger Scruton | ||
| 34bf566 | I never swallowed in its entirety the free-market rhetoric of the Thatcherites. But I deeply sympathized with Thatcher's motives. She wanted the electorate to recognize that the individual's life is his own and the responsibility of living it cannot be borne by anyone else, still less by the state. She hoped to release the talent and enterprise that, notwithstanding decades of egalitarian claptrap, she believed yet to exist in British socie.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| c5cfb8a | In the light of this, it seems to me, we should recognize that the problem of climate change that occupies international negotiations today is not in fact a diplomatic problem. It is primarily a scientific problem: the problem of discovering a cheap and effective source of clean energy that will remove both the cost of signing up to a treaty and the motive to defect from it. The solution to this scientific problem is indeed more likely to b.. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 9eda67e | Our national jurisdictions are now bombarded by laws from outside, even though hardly any of these laws are concerned with the avoidance of war. We, the citizens, are powerless in the matter, and they, the legislators, entirely unanswerable to us, who must obey them. This is exactly what Kant dreaded, as the sure path, first to despotism and then to anarchy. The | Roger Scruton | ||
| 52d7c1c | Although the border between Canada and the United States is disputed, and has been disputed for a century or more, the chances that this dispute will lead to war are zero. The | Roger Scruton | ||
| d28b4bf | Enemies can be confronted only if they are first brought to earth. And that means bringing them to earth somewhere, as the Americans brought al-Qa'eda to earth in Afghanistan. Globalization may have made it harder to defend ourselves against terrorist assaults, but we are nevertheless defending territory, the place where we are, and hunting down our enemies in the place where they are. | Roger Scruton | ||
| 7e2886e | The author assumed that the main task of government is to distribute the collective wealth of society among its members, and that, in the matter of distribution, the government is uniquely competent. The fact that wealth can be distributed only if it is first created seemed to have escaped his notice. | Roger Scruton | ||
| d41ee53 | In a sense you are always more clearly aware than I can be of what I am in the world; and when I confront my own face, there may be a moment of fear, as I try to fit the person whom I know so well to this thing that others know better | Roger Scruton | ||
| e63d9bf | The freedom to entertain and express opinions, however offensive to others, has been regarded since Locke as the sine qua non of a free society. This | Roger Scruton | ||
| f8d37a7 | Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball. | Baseball | ||
| 639aa51 | This is possible only if we retain our trust in negotiation and in the sincere desire, among politicians, to compromise with their opponents. Hence in both Britain and America it is necessary for conservatives to defend the politics of compromise, and to protect all those institutions and customs that give a voice to opposition. This | Roger Scruton | ||
| a851483 | the good citizen is the one who knows when voting is the wrong way to decide a question, as well as when voting is the right way. For | Roger Scruton |