Atanu Dey on economic freedom: “I argue that India is poor because Indians have not realized that economic freedom matters, and therefore they have not ever desired economic freedom. Consequently, they have not enjoyed economic freedom. But all is not lost. Indians, like the rest of humanity, may be slow on the uptake at times but not eternally so. One of these days, Indians will wake up to realize that what they principally lack is freedom, and that they lack the primary freedom — economic freedom. I argue that economic freedom trumps political freedom, and is only a part of civic and human freedom. The most necessary freedom is economic freedom, and every other variety of freedom — civic and political — is downstream of that. If one does not have property rights that is at the core of economic freedom, one does not have civic and political freedom.”
WSJ: “John Milton’s ‘Areopagitica’ (1644) failed in its original mission, but it is now widely regarded as the world’s first important essay in defense of freedom of expression…“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties,” wrote Milton, in a line that has echoed across centuries. Another famous passage is engraved above the entrance to the reading room of the New York Public Library: “A good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and tresur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life.” That may sound like extravagant nonsense, but Milton was deadly serious. He equated censorship with murder: “Who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the image of God.””
Arnold Kling on network-based education: “This white paper depicts an alternative form of higher education that will rely heavily on people who participate in and support the world of profit-seeking businesses. The goal is to displace the Ivy League. Success will mean that in five years, a survey will find that a majority of middle-class high school seniors and their parents will say that they are “seriously considering” an alternative to attending a four-year college, [and] in seven years, applications for admission to Ivy League colleges will be down 75 percent from what they are today.”
