Quotation of the Day…

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… is from pages 78-79 of the late Ronald Max Hartwell’s 1975 paper “Capitalism and the Historians,” as this paper appears in Essays on Hayek (Fritz Machlup, ed., 1976):

The opponents of capitalism are generally not moved by liberal arguments about freedom and choice, the existence of which they reject as illusory or irrelevant. The opponents of capitalism depend on a mutually reinforcing battery of facts, theories, and values that cannot be disturbed by country evidence, and are not susceptible to rational argument. It is a prime mistake of the liberal, therefore, to imagine that he can win the debate about “capitalism versus socialism” by the normal academic game of proving or disproving according to rules and logic.