I am preparing a lecture on some of the most interesting figures in contemporary American political thought. As I work through their ideas, which naturally diverge in many directions, I find that they nevertheless have several things in common.
One of them is that, in their youth, they all embraced the Thatcherite-Klausian vision of the free market. But as history unfolded, one event after another came along to thoroughly discredit that view. Today, they understand that the market should simply be one of the instruments employed by the sovereign (the monarch, the government, or whoever bears responsibility for the country) to achieve his objectives. Those objectives may be described in different terms, but they invariably involve economic prosperity, security, and stability. If the determination of national objectives is left to market equilibrium, the result is invariably a catastrophe—both economic and civilizational.
Many thoughtful people in the Czech Republic have undergone the same intellectual evolution. And it is rather reassuring to discover that we are not alone in this. That it is a shared experience throughout the Western world.
Those of our generation who have yet to acknowledge this find themselves living in a world they cannot explain. As a result, they become entangled in moralizing, mysticism, and conspiracy theories.
Coincidentally, around the same time, I received a question from Parlamentní listy, and my response refers to one of these thinkers:
“As Curtis Yarvin writes (and on this point he is absolutely right), every instance of importing foreign workers represents a failure of government. After all, government has two fundamental responsibilities: to ensure security and to increase national wealth. And the most valuable asset of any nation is its people.
National wealth therefore grows primarily through the development of human capabilities, and those capabilities are developed above all through work. Human capabilities do not improve when people buy more attractive consumer goods or take more luxurious vacations. They improve when people work.
If a government allows its own people to remain idle or to perform unnecessary or menial work (the kind of work that robots should have taken over long ago), while importing foreigners to work in their place, then it is governing badly.”