The Moral Foundations of the Market Order by Richard M. Reinsch II

 The Moral Foundations of the Market Order by Richard M. Reinsch II 

The Christians build on the ancients. Their faith was “necessary to wrest man, as a child of God, from the grasp of the State and to undertake (in the words of Guglielmo Ferrero) the destruction of the ‘Pharaonic spirit’ of the State of antiquity.” Such freedom issues from an understanding of the person as possessing a transcendent destiny that no state could define or foreclose without acting unjustly. The key text separating the ancients from Christianity, Röpke maintained, is Christ’s statement “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s but to God the things which are God’s.” This phrase “expresses, after all, what is in our minds when we speak of liberalism in its widest sense.”

Beautiful, moral defense of free markets.

What We Have to Lose by Theodore Dalrymple

 What We Have to Lose by Theodore Dalrymple 

No one asked, "What are these concerts for?" or "What is the point of playing Mozart when the world is ablaze?" No one thought, "How many divisions has Myra Hess?" or "What is the firepower of a Mozart rondo?" Everyone understood that these concerts, of no account in the material or military sense, were a defiant gesture of humanity and culture in the face of unprecedented brutality. They were what the war was about. They were a statement of the belief that nothing could or ever can vitiate the value of civilization; and no historical revisionism, however cynical, will ever subvert this noble message.

One of my favorite authors reminding us why we must preserve civilization at all costs.