Greetings from Aix-en-Provence!
Well, I’ve figured out how to make my phone work (you have to change the band settings). Bulgaria was fun, except for getting a terrible cold in the mountains of Bulgaria without cold medication: (How much we come to take for granted! But unlike my trips to such countries in 1989 and 1990, I could buy real medicine in Plovdiv.) And the students werre so enthusiastic about the ideas of liberty, that it more than made up for the rather spartan conditions.
I’m in Aix-en-Provence to teach about law and politics at a seminar on liberal (libertarian) ideas for European students. Next week I’m giving talks at the 25th Summer University of the New Economics on the growth of the regulatory state and on the prospect for a ‘Clash of Civilizations’. For the latter, I’ll discuss the Samuel Huntington thesis after 9/11. I’m not as pessimistic as Huntington and will show how Huntington ignores principles from economics — articulated by J.-B. Say; F. Bastiat, and other liberal thinkers — that offer us some hope for peaceful co-existence among civilizations.