Keynes was one of the best writers who ever referred to himself as an economist. His career as a popular journalist demonstrated that he knew how to make himself understood, and he had come to the central ideas of The General Theory years before its publication. He had plenty of time to make it presentable. The book is difficult and obscure because he wanted it to be. And its sheer ugliness created a small industry of interpreters, some of whom enjoyed distinguished careers and won Nobel Prizes just by simplifying or interpreting sections of the book.
“Denmark is far from a socialist, planned economy. Denmark is a market economy,” Lars Løkke Rasmussen explained in 2015. The facts bear him out. Denmark ranks higher than the United States on the free-market Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom (eighth for Denmark, seventeenth for the US). In general, Denmark, like most Northern European countries, has an open, low-tariff, competitive economy. In some ways it better incentivizes the accumulation of capital than America does, with lower taxes on capital gains and inheritance (the estate tax is 15% in Denmark and zero in Sweden and Norway).
Unlike the conservative authoritarian, the fascist, as earlier noted, aims to stifle all independence and diversity. The authoritarian relies for control on fear and acquiescence; the fascist, on fear and popular mobilization. Although fascism won power through the ballot with the aid of irresolute constitutional authorities, it embraced illegality and violence as routine and acceptable methods in politics. Nazism in Germany added the toxic element of anti-Semitism.
Though some who loved Goldwater were bigots, Goldwater himself was less bigot than libertarian, approving in old age, for example, gay marriage. He nevertheless united the various streams of the hard right into a force with which Nixon and Ford had to deal and which won the Republican Party after 1980.
“The enemy of conservatism,” Samuel Huntington wrote, “is not liberalism, but radicalism.”
Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.
Process goals encouraged me to enjoy the present moment. They are brief and achievable. I set up process goals and fun tasks and projects so that I never had to worry about future “outcome” goals. The best futures get created in the present moment.
