The Digger

Excerpt: By way of background, the main current of what is called “libertarianism” in the United States, and “liberalism” elsewhere, treats the Gilded Age as a satisfactory proxy for the “free market.” See, for example, Jacob Hornberger’s  characterization  of that period as a close approximation to laissez-faire because… well, read it for yourself: So, here you have, Richard, a society where there was no income tax, no welfare state to speak of. I mean, there was land grants to the railroads, but there was no Social Security, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no education grants. I think the only real welfare program was pensions to Civil War veterans. And so here you had a society where government didn’t take care of anybody. No, the government didn’t take care of anybody — except the Robber Barons who got those land grants, whose extent was larger than entire European countries. And the plutocracy as a whole, who inherited the property distribution, wage system, and other ...

A plea for liberal nationalism ignores what it has looked like in practice. Morsels:  Yascha Mounk, a lecturer at Harvard who has emerged as a kind of expert on the vogueish “crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of populism” (he has also written for this magazine), has hit upon what he believes is a novel idea for achieving “a kind of society for which there is no clear precedent”—that is, a liberal democracy in a multiethnic country that was for a long time either monoethnic or subject to a racial hierarchy. In his new book, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, the executive director at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change’s “Renewing the Centre team” argues that a revitalized liberalism is the answer. [...] Mounk’s sociological realism should not be confused with critique. His treatise is inspired neither by anti-elite animus nor the radical promise of democracy. It is instead a view from above, or perhaps something lik...

Link:   Milton Friedman: Old School Liberalism | Hoover Institution The New Democrat(ic) Party has been worshipping at the feet of Milton Friedman - Chicago School economic dogma became the new thing - since Jimmy Carter "campaigned against Ford as the prophet of neo-liberalism, precursor of the Democratic Leadership Council, touting “zero-based budgeting," backed Keynes up to the edge of the ideological precipice. Clinton formalized the Dem Party's break with Keynes by kicking him over the edge and seating Milton on Keynes' political-economic throne. Clinton's economic advisors gave it all a 'neo' slant-and-twist, and it all went global; infecting conservative, liberal, and "socialist" parties across the EU-Atlanticist universe. Excerpt: "Liberalism, as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and flowered in the nineteenth, puts major emphasis on the freedom of individuals to control their own destinies. Individu...