\\\"The wages of domestic servants have risen very greatly in recent years. Had there been a union of domestic servants, the increase would have come through the union, and would have been attributed to it.\\\" (Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman, page 123. University of Chicago Press 1962)
That\\\'s Friedman failing to do elementary economic analysis when it would tell him something he didn\\\'t want to know about. Simple ...

Want to win the lottery? Clearly what you should do is enter a card with the winning numbers before the draw. Obvious, isn’t it?
Readers should have no trouble noticing that the ‘answer’ supposes that you know the very thing you need to know, and which should not even be knowable. But the ‘rational economics’ invoked by the New Right is full of arguments that are no more sensible. They produce fancy mathematics that covertly assumes that ...

Back in the 1960s, it was moot if capitalism still existed. Defenders of the ‘mixed economy’ certainly denied it. Most of the left insisted that Keynesianism or Democratic-Corporatistism was capitalism. There was also a strong belief that capitalism was a permanent barrier to sexual and racial equality, a perpetual source of class division, the root of bourgeois evil.

A misreading of the period 1945-1975 left the bulk of the left ...

Marshall McLuhan became famous for coining the phrase, “global village”. Now, he was right about modern telecommunication allowing the whole world to chat as quickly and easily as the people in a single village used to do. But he was typically American, and wrong, in ignoring the social side. For a village is above all a social unit. People know each other, know each other’s parents and grandparents, share common values, care about each ...

Post-War ‘capitalism’?
Socialists in the 1960s managed to overturn the standard view of the Keynesian economy order. The ‘Golden Quarter-century’ had been built on a belief that markets and private enterprise were mixed blessings—which must be used and curbed by the state on behalf of the society—and that the reformed system was no longer capitalist; that capitalism was as much part of the bad old past as fascism and imperialism. That ...