Stephen Davies

"Capitalism in this account is not truly modern, inasmuch as something we can describe with that word has existed repeatedly in history. It has usually come to a bad end, because of the way private wealth and fear of losing it has interacted with predatory power, but in the modern world we have avoided that. Only so far however, which is why we must be constantly in campaign mode to keep the show on the road." ~ Stephen Davies

"The aim should be to strictly fence off and limit the scope of coercive public health as both an ideal and a practice. We should think of it as something like a nuclear reactor core – useful, even essential but something that needs to be tightly contained. This is the kind of project and activity that individualists and classical liberals should be engaged in." ~ Stephen Davies

A common fantasy is that the internet would survive and keep us all together but is exactly that – a total fantasy. Already the internet produces as much carbon emissions as the airline industry.

Liberals of all types should not despair and feel they are like Sir Edward Grey watching the lights of liberal civilisation go out all over Europe: if they understand better where we are then the new state of affairs could end up being an improvement over the way they have been for the last two to three decades.

The specific events of Brexit are located in a wider story of political change that applies to almost all of the developed world and to many less developed countries as well. The book also explains why Brexit was the form this wider process took in the specific case of the UK.

If we realise what the real risks are and take effective action that makes use of the advantages we have compared to our ancestors then we can survive a major pandemic. If we panic, however, and do things that seem to make sense but actually make the economic and social effects worse, then the prospects are bad.

In fact, one outcome of AI and automation may well be a revival of manual labor and of the traditional working class — maybe becoming more like an artisan class again.

What automation of any kind does is to make work more productive and hence to free up time and resources by increasing the intensity of the use of resources.

We should never take the victories of previous generations of liberals for granted. Free movement is one of those.

The right of individuals to move within a state, if it is one that overrides and excludes any political power to control movement and residence, should also extend to a right to move across political borders.