Enjoying the view from Limbo
You may appreciate a man’s talent for making money, but you must never admire him for it. For this would mean regarding wealth, or the getting of wealth, as the gifted wealth-getter himself does, namely as a mark of personal greatness. On the contrary, one could do worse than to adopt the following as a general rule: No extraordinarily rich man — especially...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 20, 2021 · Last modified July 31, 2021
Today’s mass entertainment is obsessed above all with two themes: superheroes and zombies. This is self-revealing, as we are indeed trapped in the age of the undead, whose only mode of living is to suck the life out of others, and whose only hope of being saved from their emptiness is to lose themselves in the last realm of imagination left for hollow,...
I hate corporate slogans, celebrity spokesmen, logo-infested products, and the like. Make something well and tell me about it. If I like it and think I need it, I will buy it. Do not lie to me to try to sucker me into buying your product. Do not pay some famous actor or singer to “represent” your product as a means of cajoling...
Black Lives Matter. What does that even mean? You don’t know, so don’t bother trying to answer. You don’t know, because the phrase actually means exactly nothing, or at least nothing to do with the words that comprise the phrase. It is a slogan meant to sound brave and ideological precisely to obscure or deflect from its lack of any comprehensible significance in...
As I have noted since the earliest days of The Pandemic that Ate a Planet, none of the hysteria of this season, and therefore none of the political fraud and usurpation we are seeing each day, would have been possible without the willing assistance and very able wheel-greasing of the mass media. We are witnessing the perfect alignment of all of the media’s...
“Property is theft” is the cleverest expression of greed and envy. It is greed masked as righteousness, and envy proffered as insight. Every enlightened person today — from every successful social science professor, acclaimed film director, and bestselling pop singer, to every socially adjusted teenager and right-thinking government office worker — says “the system” is set up to enrich the few at the...
Yet again, socialists are out to prove beyond any doubt that their ideology is entirely rooted in, and fueled by, one overriding passion: envy. There is no subject more revealing of the Marxist mind than “the rich.” The moment a Marxist (or socialist or progressive) is asked to explain why it is problematic that some people are enormously wealthy, while others are not,...
History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy. Reflections of a Young Man (1935) What, then, do history and experience call the man who has devised the means to the most universal forms of collective misery, and in whose name...
In recent years, there has been an increasing undercurrent of discussion among conservative scholars and public voices about whether conservatism is theoretically hamstrung by the continued use of the term “capitalism” in mainstream political discussion. I wrote about this question six years ago, before it became something of a hot issue, and I’d like to reproduce my take on it below. A few...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 21, 2017 · Last modified November 14, 2017
Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. — President John Adams, 1798 Is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? — Milton Friedman, 1979 In a famous 1979 interview, Phil Donahue challenged Milton Friedman to defend capitalism against the charge that it fosters greed. Friedman deftly parried that greed motivates men in all nations, not merely...
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