“Best car England ever made,' was how Jim had introduced his car. 'Out of production, thanks to socialism.”
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“In order to join the Congregational Church, the applicant not only had to affirm each and every tenet of Calvinism, he had to demonstrate that he had gone through a standardized sequence of spiritual experiences. (Alcoholics Anonymous is the only Protestant cult which still imposes this requirement.)”
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“But the evidence collated by the Central Bank of Ireland once the crisis was finally resolved in November 1970 showed quite the opposite. Their review of the closure concluded not only that “the Irish economy continued to function for a reasonably long period of time with its main clearing banks closed for business,” but that “the level of economic activity continued to increase” over the period.37 Both before and after the event, it seemed unbelievable—but somehow, it had worked: for six and a half months, in one of the then thirty wealthiest economies in the world, “a highly personalized credit system without any definite time horizon for the eventual clearance of debits and credits substituted for the existing institutionalized banking system.”
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“Reading books on the Amish, all positive, all written by sympathizers,34 one is struck by how dark their picture of the outside world is. It is a world where people spend most of their efforts in competitive endeavor and display, in keeping up with the Joneses, where lives are divided among the almost wholly separate circles of work, family, and church, where little meaningful happens or can happen, a world of boredom and alienation.”
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“We want people to be very low-status, but we don’t want to feel sympathy for them—slaves are always supposed to sing at their work.”
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Chris’s 2025 Year in Books
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