In describing or communicating anything beyond brute fact you need to generalize. Ideas are generalizations, and the conflict in any philosophy of action begins with the necessary but troubled equation of ideas and objects. For liberalism, predicated on ideas of individual liberty, this conflict becomes almost a paradox; that my mother, as a reader both of literature and law, could shrug off John Rawls as being "more interested in ideas than people," was not something I took lightly.

Still the desire was not dishonorable in itself, not nearly as much as the claim of success.

Can there be a human being more small minded, vulgar and anti-intellectual than Tyler Cowen? He makes DeLong look like the font of wisdom. What a pathetic little fuck.