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Showing posts with the label Isiah Berlin

Three Questions About Free Market Economics

I stopped reading The Economist, and that makes my weekends somewhat free. For fifteen years, since the time I first left India and went on to live in Dhaka, fetching it from the shop and reading it from cover to cover was part of my Friday routine. There were early disappointments - such as its blood-curdling advocacy of the Iraq War, which clearly exposed its Western bias - but it was one essential viewpoint that I needed to understand the world.  However, I increasingly found it disagreeable for its fundamentalist approach towards Free Markets. This is not a political left / right thing. Though I am openly delighted by the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the Labour leader, who I consider to be a vast improvement over the careerist politicians we see all around (alas, one of my favourite writers, Tristram Hunt, turned out to be one of them), I would like to think that I support free markets if they are really free. These are indeed my points of agreement with The Economist - w...