Imaginative Conservative Related:Nock and Nisbet on Society and State (essay by Bradley J. Birzer) https://t.co/WWUUYElD6X
— ImaginativeConservat (@imaginativecons) September 5, 2020
You might be interested in this Russell Kirk review essay of Quest for Community. The recent Pepperdine online event reminded me of Nisbet so I just posted this as the Classic Kirk essay of the month: https://t.co/YWT0iOR8I1
— Cecilia Kirk Nelson (@CeciliaKNelson) September 4, 2020
The Counsel of Despair? Albert Jay Nock on Self-Government (essay by William Batchelder) https://t.co/z7tPY0JFC8
— ImaginativeConservat (@imaginativecons) August 19, 2020
Thomas Jefferson laid great stress on literacy as an indispensable asset to good citizenship and sound patriotism. He was all for having everybody become literate, and those who have examined his own library (it is preserved intact in the Library of Congress) may easily see why. Mutatis mutandis, if everybody read the kind of thing he did, and as he did, he would have been right. But in his laudable wish to make the benefits of literacy accessible to all, Mr. Jefferson did not see that he had the operation of two natural laws dead against him. He seems to have jumped to the conclusion that, because certain qualified persons got a definite benefit out of literacy, anybody could get the same benefit on the same terms; and here he collided with the law of diminishing returns. He seems also to have imagined that a general indiscriminate literacy would be compatible with keeping up something like the proportion that he saw existing between good literature and bad; and here the great and good old man ran hard aground on Gresham’s law.
Gresham’s law has to do with the nature of currency, and the common formula for it is that “bad money drives out good.” That is to say, it is always the worst form of currency in circulation that fixes the value of all the others and causes them presently to disappear. Gresham’s law usually comes into play whenever a government undertakes to settle a bill for its misfeasances by the larcenous expedient of “managing” its currency; hence of late years this law has been very busy with the currency of many countries.
