The French Revolution was a complex historical event, and its intellectual foundations were likewise complex. It is a mistake to reduce it to the Jacobin terror. It was a liberal revolution whose ideals sprang from the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition.
AUSTRIAN ACADEMY 2022: Experienced economist Philip Booth, formerly research director of the London Institute of Economic Affairs and now a professor at Catholic Twickenham University in London, introduces the complex issue of global-level regulation from a consistently liberal perspective.
Since Putin’s war against Ukraine, the West once again has a clear enemy. Many now recall Carl Schmitt, who saw the essence of the political in the distinction between friend and enemy. But that is too simplistic.
Capitalism and the market economy are the foundations of our prosperity, which, thanks to globalization, is also spreading to places in which poverty still prevailed decades ago. At the Austrian Academy 2021 experts explain to twenty-two young people why this is so.
The Greens are painting a picture of environmental and climate apocalypse. In this way, they try to moralize the debate and present themselves as the advocates of the good. On closer inspection, their program turns out to be ideological wishful thinking that eschews capitalism and the market economy.
Did the rich get rich by robbing the poor? Theology and Catholic social teaching have long known that wealth generation is not a zero-sum game, but a process from which everyone benefits.
In his book “Why Liberalism Failed” Patrick Deneen deals with all varieties of Liberalism. They are the fruit of a false image of man – an assertion which, however, proves to be questionable on closer inspection.
For years Bolivia was considered a successful example of the “Socialism of the 21st century”. An apparently booming economy blinded economists and politicians and obscured the view of a regime that was in reality authoritarian and corrupt.
Pope Francis never called for a “universal basic income” as a new socio-political model. He asked for financial assistance for those on the margins who have been harmed by the quarantine. Even so, the idea of a “basic income” is only feasible, if at all, in a country with strong protection of property rights and a market economy.
