I Was Paid To Read

You Cannot Have Democratic Accountability In Anything Bigger Than A Nation State.

I Was 25 Years Old And Pursuing My Doctorate In Economics When I Was Allowed To Spend Six Months Of Postgraduate Studies In Naples, Italy. I Read The Western Economic Textbooks And Also The More General Work Of People Like Hayek. By The Time I Returned To Czechoslovakia, I Had An Understanding Of The Principles Of The Market. In 1968, I Was Glad At The Political Liberalism Of The Dubcek Prague Spring, But I Was Very Critical Of The Third Way They Pursued In Economics.

Then In 1969, I Spent The Spring Term At Cornell University In New York. The Invasion Of August 1968 Had Already Happened, But The Hardline Regime Took Several Months To Crack Down On Dissidents.

And Finally, There Is Another Danger: The Emergence Of Nonideological But Very Aggressive 'isms,' Which Are Really Quite New. Let Me At Least Name Them: We All Care About Human Rights, But I Am Afraid Of 'human Rightism.' We All Want To Have A Healthy Environment, But I See The Danger In Environmentalism. To Put It Politically Correctly, I Admire The Second Gender, But I Fear Feminism. We All Are Enriched By Other Cultures, But Not By Multiculturalism. I Am Aware Of The Importance Of Voluntary Associations, But I Fear Ngoism.

Communism Was Replaced By The Threat Of Ambitious Environmentalism.