Maggie's Farm

Isaiah Berlin, via Vanderleun:

If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust and immoral.

But if I curtail or lose my freedom, in order to lessen the shame of such inequality, and do not thereby materially increase the individual liberty of others, an absolute loss of liberty occurs. This may be compensated for by a gain in justice or in happiness or peace, but the loss remains, and it is a confusion of values to say that although my ‘liberal’ individual freedom may go by the board, some other kind of freedom—social or economic—is increased.

Harold Demsetz:

Beware the intellectual who seeks power over our decisions and over the persuasion to which we can respond, especially when he seeks this power to prevent us from doing what he thinks we should not desire to do.

Laurie Penny, via Driscoll at Insty:

“Fuck social mobility… Fuck money. Fuck rising above your class… Fuck marriage, mortgage, monogamy, and every other small, ugly ambition.” These, she says, are things “we should have abandoned.”

You first, Laurie