Quinn Slobodian > Quotes

“the neoliberal project focused on designing institutions—not to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy, to create a framework to contain often-irrational human behavior, and to reorder the world after empire as a space of competing states in which borders fulfill a necessary function.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

“Ordoglobalism was haunted by two puzzles across the twentieth century: first, how to rely on democracy, given democracy's capacity to destroy itself; and second, how to rely on nations, given nationalism's capacity to "disintegrate the world".”
― Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

“Beginning in the early 1960s, Hayek began to suggest using the drafting of constitutions as a way to anchor economic freedoms against the attempts of legislatures to enact protectionist or redistributive policies.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

“Scaling national government up to the planet, creating a global government, was no solution. The puzzle of the neoliberal ­century was to find the right institutions to sustain the often strained balance between the economic world and the po­liti­cal world.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

“In his writings from the 1930s to the 1980s, Haberler insisted that the open world economy was important as a means of disciplining potentially inflationary social spending and rash projects of industrialization—and the potential problems of the developing nations were never far from his mind.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

“Hayek’s message to Hutt and others was that a state captured by black voters would cease to be a problem if the state itself was stripped preemptively of its right to grant exemptions from the discipline of the competitive market.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

“In a representative statement from 1963, he claimed, “Man does not know most of the rules on which he acts; and even what we call his intelligence is largely a system of rules which operate on him but which he does not know.”60 This deference to the precognitive or the pre-rational is what separated him from the rational choice and rational expectations models of Chicago School economists, who professed much more faith in the possibility of both formal mathematical modeling and forecasting. As he explained in his Nobel speech, Hayek saw such efforts as not only presumptuous but misleading. The best one could hope for was pattern prediction.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

“Hayek scoffed at the use of mathematics in macroeconomics to “impress politicians … which is the nearest thing to the practice of magic that occurs among professional economists.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

“Our morals,” he wrote, “the morals which have prevailed, the morals of private property and honesty, are simply those that favor the practices that assist the multiplication of mankind.”24”
― Quinn Slobodian, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

“It is true that the mother has the right over her body but not over the body of the child, which is a totally different body, it has a different DNA.… There is neither freedom nor property if you are not born.”33”
― Quinn Slobodian, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

“To Röpke, the only form of integration that might be worthy of the name followed what he called the “kernel solution.” Kernel Europe would not protect its goods from the outside world. Rather, it would create a free-trade zone and, eventually, a common “payment community” or currency union that would gradually expand over time, absorbing other nations into an ever-growing territory of specialization and free-market competition. This form of integration “may begin in Europe” but it “prepares for a transition into a universal world-economic integration.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

“In early posts on their site, Hülsmann and Polleit called fiat money an “unorthodox road to serfdom” that led inevitably to “collective corruption,”
― Quinn Slobodian, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

“While Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) theorized “dependency” as a negative state to be escaped, neoliberals openly prescribed it as a means of subjecting states to what Hayek called in the published version of his Hong Kong talk “the discipline of freedom.”98 Neither the absence of representative government nor Hong Kong’s colonial status (nor, for that matter, the public ownership of all land) deterred a journalist covering the meeting from describing Hong Kong as “the most libertarian major civilized community in the world today.”99 What was admirable, in fact, was its solution to the disruptive problem of democracy.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

“tendency of Hayek’s mode “is not to argue against competing ways of arranging society, but actually to rule them out of court as misunderstandings of reality.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

“Hutt defended the property restrictions designed to protect white-minority rule as a bulwark against “ ‘one man, one vote’ tyranny,” calling Rhodesia “the most promising deliberate attempt the world has ever seen at creating a wholly democratic, multi-racial society.”188 As paradoxical as it might sound, Hutt argued that it was precisely by denying universal suffrage that true democracy could be realized.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

“The three biggest threats were environmentalism, state spending, and European integration.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

“libertarian goal of a stateless society.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

“world central bank can force every country in the world, including the US to accept whatever political agenda the bankers have.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

“So long as you have tax pirates,” he said, “I don’t feel any moral guilt about being a tax haven just as people once took up slaves to help them escape their poor fate.”82”
― Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

“Postmaterial values, religion in its nonacquisitive form, solidarity, and sacrifice were all qualities that Hayek’s model assumed away.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

“intervención humana, «los neoliberales […] han apuntado a las condiciones extraeconómicas que posibilitan un sistema económico libre».[33] No todo el mundo reconoce que el ordoliberalismo alemán y la economía austriaca no se centraban en la economía como tal, sino en las instituciones que generaban un espacio para la economía.[34] Cuando Hayek mencionaba las «fuerzas autorreguladoras de la economía» —como hizo, por ejemplo, durante la conferencia inaugural que dio al asumir su cargo en Friburgo—, inmediatamente después hablaba de la necesidad de un «marco» para la economía.[35] Su obra se centraba en la cuestión del diseño de lo que en el libro que escribió después de Camino de servidumbre llamó los «fundamentos de la libertad».[36]”
― Quinn Slobodian, Globalistas: El fin de los imperios y el nacimiento del neoliberalismo (Ensayo)

“Because Röpke saw a perfect homology between the qualities of entrepreneurship, the civilizational category of the West, and the functioning of a free market, interest rates were not just an economic but a spiritual index, an index of Geist.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

“human beings belong to a moral world in which mere survival is not enough.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

“In his augural speech of June 1962 for his new position at the University of Freiburg, the original institutional home of Eucken and Böhm, Hayek reminisced about having learned law alongside economics ask,” he said, “ whether the separation of legal and economic studies was not perhaps, after all, a mistake.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism

“When we do, we discover that neoliberal thought is not filled with solutions but with problems.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

“What is a zone? At its most basic, it is an enclave carved out of a nation and freed from ordinary forms of regulation. The usual powers of taxation are often suspended within its borders, letting investors effectively dictate their own rules. The zones are quasi-extraterritorial, both of the host state and distinct from it.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

“If the greatest number becomes the criterion of truth and efficiency, then whatever evolution may do, it will always be right.”18”
― Quinn Slobodian, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

“judge citizens by the standards of productivity and efficiency.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

“The masses are always and everywhere indolent, dull, stupid, and incapable of developing their own (not preconceived) thoughts,”
― Quinn Slobodian, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

“Egalitarianism required the suppression of the fact of human difference in capacity.”
― Quinn Slobodian, Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right