The Long View on Brexit: Liberalism, Nationalism, and Socialism–by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
Riceviamo, e volentieri pubblichiamo, da Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. La versione italiana dell’articolo è disponibile qui.
In the past three centuries the European clerisy has had, when it comes to politics and economics, three ideas, one of them very, very good and the two others very, very bad. The first one, emerging in the eighteenth century from the pens of people like Voltaire, Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and above all the Blessed Adam Smith, is what Smith called “allowing every man [or woman, dear] to pursue his own interest in his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice.” The implementation of liberalism in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth, when it could make its way against the two bad ideas, was astounding it its fruits. It made ordinary people bold, bold to try out betterments in a market test. Their boldness in pursuing their own interests resulted in the Great Enrichment, which is to say the rise of European incomes per head by 3,000 percent, 1800 to the present.