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“... a floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself’. Milton Friedman took on this idea in the form of a Negative Income Tax (NIT), one of the many subspecies of UBI. The government sets a minimum income figure: over that number, you pay taxes to the state; below it, the state tops up your income, gradually tapering the ...”

“... To live in the Nineties is to have first-hand experience of l’entre-siècle, a useful word I picked up from Kenneth Silver. Expect to see signs of what Henri Focillon in his book on the year 1000 identified as ‘centurial mysticism’, an affliction even more likely to be endemic when the century that is ending is also ending a millennium. These chronological divisions are meaningless in themselves, but, as Focillon argued, we tend to project onto them aspirations and anxieties which have quite other sources ...”

“... a late-life role as a prophetic outsider.He was born in 1904, the first child of Julius and Ella Friedman Oppenheimer. His father was a successful cloak manufacturer, his mother a patron of the arts who adorned their apartment with her collection – which included a Rembrandt etching, paintings by Renoir and Van Gogh, and a Blue Period Picasso. She was ...”

“... for the rich and free enterprise for the poor’, which I think pre-empts Milton Friedman as author of that essential line about the way we live now. There is also a pregnant observation borrowed by Vidal from his post-war visits to the monkish cell of George Santayana. He judges the author of Egotism in ...”

“... the efforts of all the artillery officers, from General Hayek, in his Swiss château, to Colonel Friedman, on secondment from the US artillery, to recruits like Major Walters, not yet a staff officer treading the backstairs of 10 Downing Street, as well as a phalanx of fresh-faced subalterns, all set on loading the shells into the breech to fire off in the ...”

“... of the American political system that you can call the president a moron – or, as Thomas Friedman recently put it on the front page of the New York Times, ‘flat-out dumb’ – but you can’t call into question the sanctity or power of his office. Whatever your complaints, the president has ultimate military authority, and there are plenty of ...”

“... mischief. He confided to his secretary that he liked blacks no better than Jews. In 1976, Milton Friedman spoke up in Newsweek for white minority rule in Rhodesia, and visited the University of Cape Town to explain to its predominantly white, segregated student body his opposition to universal suffrage in South Africa. Echoing Mises, he described it as ...”

“... in, or of their willingness to work, has a long history on the Right. In the early 1960s, Milton Friedman came out in favour of one form of the idea, and in Britain it has circulated at the margins of Conservative politics for half a century, being espoused most recently by William Hague’s friend Alan Duncan. Support for free migration has also come mostly ...”

“... open war on the Barisan was set in motion by the last British commissioner of Singapore, George Douglas-Hamilton, an exceptionally wily colonial hand. As the historian P.J. Thum has recounted, Douglas-Hamilton made a point of arranging a rendezvous with Lim and other Barisan figures (making it appear that they, not he, had arranged it), during which ...”

“... is Chomsky, who revolutionised the study of linguistics, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Milton Friedman in economics, though Keynes may last longer. This doesn’t mean that contemporary US universities aren’t obsessed with ‘theory’, only that the ‘theory’ either comes from outside America, is modelled on economics (which has a strong ...”

“... go by quite so fast. At the start of 2008, Gordon Brown was prime minister of the United Kingdom, George W. Bush was president of the United States, and only politics wonks had ever heard of the junior senator from Illinois; Nicolas Sarkozy was president of France, Hu Jintao was general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Ken Livingstone was mayor of ...”

“... option for restless spirits: a motive that can be traced back to early Victorian times, when George Borrow’s fascination with Spanish or Gypsy low life was bred of detestation for native ‘gentility’. On the other hand, Britain’s Imperial primacy – whose memory long outlasted its reality – inevitably encouraged dreams of daring exploits in ...”

“... half an hour to climb twenty storeys to the roof, and four hours to engulf the building. As Danny Friedman, one of the lawyers representing the survivors, said towards the end of the inquiry: ‘We are still in the era of the rolled-back state and Grenfell is one of its greatest failings. The centre of government – particularly the ministries of everyday ...”

“... knows that what is good does not come automatically. That may require an army. A Napoleon. Or a George W. Bush. A price must be paid if we want human rights to spread. We should not blame Napoleon for using violence, but for not going far enough. Napoleon’s mistake was that he employed freedom and equality as symbols to help his army win battles rather ...”