Some may remember the deadly book of Aristotle that plays a vital part in the plot of Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel The Name of the Rose. Poisoned by a mad Benedictine monk, the book wreaks havoc in a 14th-century Italian monastery, killing all readers who happen to lick their fingers when turning the toxic pages.
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Milton Friedman is probably the most important free-market thinker of the twentieth century. His ideas in defense of capitalism and economic freedom had an enormous influence on the shift towards free-market policies that took place from the 1970s onwards. Countries like the UK, China, Chile, or Estonia followed the economic recipes contained in best sellers
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In his famous Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle recognizes that we human beings aim at attaining a veritable panoply of goods. This panoply includes goods as diverse as life, friends, comfortable shoes, a steak dinner, fine wine, health, the virtues, enough money to meet one’s needs, medicine when one is ill, sufficient exercise, and so forth. All
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“Students are commonly told that Jesus was amenable to socialism because he favored the sharing of wealth. But in fact, he taught personal responsibility, voluntary charity, and doing good from the heart, not from someone else’s wallet.” “The only thing new in the world,” President Harry Truman famously said, “is the history you do not
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Philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is most famous for “Pascal’s Wager,” the argument that human beings “bet” with their lives on the existence of God. Yet Pascal’s celebrated book of philosophical musings Pensées (in which the Wager appears) is chock full of keen insights about the human condition—many as timely now as when they
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When you think of American statesmen, you likely think of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. They led America through periods of political chaos and enormous uncertainty when few others could. Many long for statesmen of a similar type to lead America through its current challenges, but does America have any statesman left? Why does
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