From Elizabeth Warren’s 2012 Senate campaign, quoted by John Cassidy in his review of her autobiography.

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: You moved the goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory…. Now look, you built the factory and it turned into something terrific, or great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid that comes along.

That clip from her campaign is on YouTube.

Interesting essay by Robert Skidelsky bringing an element of historical knowledge to bear on the current crisis in Ukraine.

Before we drift into Cold War II, we would do well to recall why we had the first one. The end of Communism removed one important reason: the Soviet Union’s expansionist thrust and the Western democracies’ determination to resist it. But other reasons remain.

American diplomat George F. Kennan identified them as neurotic insecurity and Oriental secretiveness on the Russian side, and legalism and moralism on the Western side. The middle ground of cool calculation of interests, possibilities, and risks remains elusive to this day.

Kennan is reckoned to have laid the Cold War’s intellectual foundation – at least in the West – with his “long telegram” from Moscow in February 1946, which he followed with his famous Foreign Affairs article, signed “X,” in July 1947. Kennan argued that long-term peace between the capitalist West and communist Russia was impossible, owing to the mixture of traditional Russian insecurity, Stalin’s need for an external enemy, and communist messianism.

Russia, Kennan argued, would seek to bring about the collapse of capitalism not by an armed attack, but by a mixture of bullying and subversion. The correct response, said Kennan, should be “containment” of Soviet aggression through the “adroit and vigilant application of counterforce.”

During President Harry Truman’s administration, United States officials interpreted Kennan’s view as requiring a military build-up against a potential Communist invasion of Western Europe. This gave rise to the Truman Doctrine, from which sprang the logic of military confrontation, NATO, and the arms race.

These developments dismayed Kennan, who claimed that containment was meant to be economic and political, not military. He was one of the main architects of the post-WWII Marshall Plan. He opposed the formation of NATO.

Skidelsky thinks that the West is playing this wrongly and ineptly. We’re doing what Kennan warned against — foreign policy that is “utopian in its expectation, legalistic in its concept…moralistic…and self-righteous,” The goal of Western policy today, he thinks, “should be to find the means to work with Russia to stop Ukraine from being torn apart”. This means

talking and listening to the Russians. The Russians have presented their ideas for resolving the crisis. Broadly, they propose a “neutral” Ukraine on the model of Finland and a federal state on the model of Switzerland. The first would exclude NATO membership, but not admission to the European Union. The second would aim to secure semi-autonomous regions.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphSuch proposals may be cynical; they may also be unworkable. But the West should be urgently testing, exploring, and seeking to refine them instead of recoiling in moralistic horror at Russia’s actions.

Makes sense to me.

Thomas Piketty’s remarkable book continues to create a storm of controversy and publicity. It has been Amazon.com’s #1 Bestseller (though, given Amazon’s pathological secrecy, who knows that what means?) and it’s at the top of the New York Times bestseller non-fiction list. It’s already sold over 100,000 copies in the US. And it’s got the American Right rattled and/or annoyed.

So there is definitely a Piketty Phenomenon. In conversation the other day, a sceptical colleague jokingly observed that Capital in the Twenty-First Century “looks like being the next Harry Potter”. But then we had a more sober conversation in which both of us racked our brains to identify the last time a serious book had garnered such astonishing attention. And the answer we came up with was Francis Fukuyama’s famous book, The End of History and the Last Man, which was published in 1992 and appeared to catch the Zeitgeist. Certainly it transformed its author into one of the world’s most prominent public intellectuals. My expectation is that Piketty’s book will do the same for him.

Interestingly, Fukuyama recently published an interesting article in Foreign Affairs lamenting the dearth of good left-wing ideas. Perhaps he didn’t know that Piketty’s tome was coming down the tracks?

Interesting piece by Michael Cohen. Extract:

The US swaggers along on the world stage with a certainty and sense of moral purpose that no other country can match. Blessed with practically limitless national resources, a dynamic and diverse population, a relatively stable political system and innovative technological capabilities that other nations can only dream of, how can so many Americans be falling behind – and how can the nation’s leaders allow it to happen?

The answer is disconcertingly simple: we chose this path.

Granted, no one actively set out to attack the middle class in America. There wasn’t some evil plan hatched behind closed doors to wreak socio-economic havoc. But the decline of the American middle class, the ostentatious wealth of the so-called 1% and the crushing economic anxiety of the growing number of poor Americans have happened in plain sight.

It is the direct result of a political system that has for more than four decades abdicated its responsibilities – and tilted the economic scales toward the most affluent and well-connected in American society. The idea that government has an obligation to create jobs, grow the economy, construct a social safety net or even put the interests of the most vulnerable in society above the most successful has gone the way of transistor radios, fax machines and VCRs. Today, America is paying the price for that indifference to this slow-motion economic collapse.

All true. The question is: what will happen when — and if — this penny drops? Will anything happen?

Answer: both — as Nick Cohen argues in a terrific column about the Ukip leader.

When considering Ukip, we should remember the advice of Lord Renwick, a Foreign Office mandarin and Labour peer. He told young diplomats from good families that their background made them suckers for “the Wykehamist fallacy”. When they went abroad, they were in danger of believing that foreign potentates merely struck blood-curdling poses for effect. For all the bombast, they would think that, underneath, these must be civilised men with an ironic sensibility who might have been educated at Winchester. “They haven’t,” said Renwick. “Actually, they’re a bunch of thugs.”

The same should be said of Ukip.

Yep. I’ve seen Farage in action in the flesh. Nick calls him “England’s greatest living hypocrite”, and that seems about right (though there is fierce competition for that title).

He courts popularity by warning that tens of millions from the dole queues of Europe are coming to take British jobs, while employing his German wife as his secretary. He denounces “the political class” for living like princes at the taxpayers’ expense while pocketing every taxpayer-funded allowance he can claim for himself, his wife and his colleagues.

He says he represents “ordinary people”. But he is a public school-educated former banker, whose policies will help him and his kind. He claims he is the voice of “common sense”, while allying with every variety of gay-hater, conspiracy crackpot, racist, chauvinist and pillock. The only sense he and his followers have in common is a fear of anyone who is not like them.

So the question is: why have Britain’s famously aggressive mass media not torn this phoney to shreds? Could it be that he voices many of their proprietors’ (and editors’) own views?