TheMarketForIdeas

Marx & Spencer

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

The wordplay in the title blissfully suggests that mirth is a legitimate reaction to the connotations of a mundanely “hallowed” name. Phonetically, it insinuates an English apparel retailer, much appreciated by the in-crowd. Visually, there seems to be a “spelling” mistake. Obviously, it is just a caprice, of the same character as the caprices history slams in our faces; these caprices are (also) known as coincidences. They make up the tools based on which some individuals torment themselves to transform the historical fact into invariant lessons. Those individuals may be labelled “hasty” historians. And the most “arrogant” of them postulate with no remorse universal laws from past uniqueness.  More

The World after Brexit and Trump

Come to Free Market Road Show 2017! The event is organized by Austrian Economics Center - Austria (AEC) and will host interventions from renowned libertarians thinkers and speakers like Andreq Bernstein and Barbara Kolm. Individual liberty is the undying dream of western civilization. State tyranny is the enemy of democracy. More

Aristotle and the Benefits of Moderation

Alexandru Georgescu

Many times, when moving from the descriptive of “what is” to the prescriptive of “what ought to be”, it is necessary to appeal to a shared knowledge of a moral framework that imbues the ideas presented with values, concepts and interpretations that are scarcely universal, but rather grounded in one specific civilization and possibly one specific tradition. In his article in The Market for Ideas No. 2, “Blurred lines: Good vs. Good. Evil vs. Evil.”, Dragoș Tîrnăveanu crowned his analysis with a twist on the ancient Manichean (dualist) vision of a conflict of opposites – light versus dark, good versus evil. He analyzed the uncertainty of our modern age, in which an asymmetry of information and of values gives rise to morally ambiguous situations, which he termed as “Good vs. Good” and “Evil vs. Evil”.  More

Football and Invisible Hands

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

The British Isles have shared with our world, among others, two paradigms of sociality: the classic economic liberalism and the modern game of football. Contrasting the proverbial avarice, Scotland has handed us two apostles of the… “invisible hand”, that witty formula touching both the social matter-of-course and the footballer’s fetish: Adam Smith and Sir Alex Ferguson. Professor of logic and moral philosophy, searching for a unified theory of society and bringing together ideas of theology, ethics, politics and law, Adam Smith came to write the first systematic treatise on political economy in history. Smith’s thesis contrasts its logical simplicity with the complicated sophistry employed by those who ignore it: if individuals were free to pursue their own interests, doing it through entrepreneurship and commerce, with respect for the freedom of the others, the society as a whole will improve its condition, coordinating itself via the market. And opposed to the invisible hand is the statists’ “hand play”. More

Trump and the Israel Gambit

Alexandru Georgescu

There have been many attempts to label Donald Trump as an anti-Semite by his Democratic opponents, who feel themselves entitled to sling the accusation around implicitly because of Jewish voting patterns that heavily favor them. This is the sort of “scarlet letter” that instantly destroys careers, campaigns and social standing without a presumption of innocence or due process. More

The Leader of the Free World

Andrei Vlășceanu

The Arab Spring began as a spark in Tunisia and extended to the entire MENA region, causing major disorder and a political meltdown of authoritarian regimes from Libya and Egypt, but a firm stand began in Syria by the beleaguered regime, where a social uprising has been transformed into a bloody civil war. By far, the ongoing conflict in Syria is the most brutal because a “civil war” has been replaced by an international war, due to the fact that every party involved is getting outside support: More

Trump’s Budget Battles Are Just Beginning

Alexandru Georgescu

Maybe it is the effect of being immersed in the now and only being aware of the rough summary of history, but I am not alone in getting the feeling that the political polarization in the Western world has reached such a fever pitch that political coups that took place once in a generation are now occurring with greater frequency. Whether it is the unbalancing of the political establishment or the overt transgression of formal or informal political norms, one gets the feeling that politics has become unhinged. More

Googlelections

Alexandru Georgescu

Throughout history, the relationship between rulers and those who ruled was, by necessity, a distant one that, nonetheless, had the effect of enabling propaganda of divine origin or the act of being anointed by God and the imagination of the people to create larger than life figures out of mere men. Then, as with so many things in our age of modernity and post-modernity, America changed the paradigm. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt became engaged in a fundamental reworking of America’s relation to government and business in the New Deal era after the Great Depression and then in mobilizing the American people for entry into WW2. More