Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.
(..)
Even if they don’t read Aristotle (that would be undemocratic) you would have thought the French Revolution would have taught them that the behaviour aristocrats naturally like is not the behaviour that preserves aristocracy. They might then have applied the same principle to all forms of government.
I can’t find a source for the quote at the moment, but I remember reading that F. A. Hayek once said something along the lines of “The greatest enemy of capitalism is the capitalists.”
Hayek was right. Capitalists in a mixed-economy seem to be in something analogous to a prisoner’s dilemma. It would benefit any individual capitalist to seek monopoly privileges for their own firm, but it hurts all of them if any significant number of them do so.
-- Screwtape, from “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” by C. S. Lewis.
I can’t find a source for the quote at the moment, but I remember reading that F. A. Hayek once said something along the lines of “The greatest enemy of capitalism is the capitalists.”
Hayek was right. Capitalists in a mixed-economy seem to be in something analogous to a prisoner’s dilemma. It would benefit any individual capitalist to seek monopoly privileges for their own firm, but it hurts all of them if any significant number of them do so.
Not to mention this.