Boredom is a powerful incentive to come up with bad ideas, especially for intellectuals. Capitalism, says Irving Kristol, is the least romantic conception of a public order that the human mind has ever conceived. The reason it's so unromantic is that it doesn't tell people what to do and that can be very frustrating for intellectuals who want to tell people what to do. Indeed, court intellectuals have always been more influential where the people are less free, because when an intellectual persuades a dictator or a socialist prime minister (a small distinction to be sure), their advice gets translated into reality. When an intellectual says, It would be a better society if all beer was free a free-market politician would, or at least should, say Maybe, but what can I do about it?
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About Jonah Goldberg
Jonah Goldberg was a contemporary American political commentator. Jonah Jacob Goldberg is an American conservative journalist, author, and political commentator. The founding editor of National Review Online, from 1998 until 2019, he was an editor at National Review. Read more on Wikipedia →