Some of my favourites bits from Roosevelt's inaugural address as president, March 4 1933.Though anyone who humbly 'assumes unhesitatingly' the job of leading his people to moral victory might attract a dollop of healthy suspicion, it's a reminder that some politicians have, in the past, tried to quell panic and terror, rather than fuelling it for their own political gain.

Also note how the sentiments about profit and money-lenders you would never, ever hear from a New Labour politician's mouth.

I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impel. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

Just been reading a comment piece by Martin Jacques in the Guardian, about the demise of the Doha round - the 'development round' that's been dragging on for years, as developing countries rather unsportingly refuse to sign up to whatever they're offered.

Putting aside for the moment the fact that developing countries have already been asked to concede more just to get what they agreed in previous rounds, there's some, um, issues here when it comes to the work I'm going to be doing.

Market order - the very thing the various trade rounds were making the framework for, in theory - is spontaneous order. Or at least, that's Hayek's take, and the views of a few others who get round to thinking about why markets are so 'now' and hip and the in thing. Havel's quote turns up in various places - the free market is:

the only natural economy, the only kind that makes sense, the only one that can lead to prosperity, because it is the only one that reflect the nature of life itself. The essence of life is infinitely and mysteriously multiform, and therefore it cannot be contained or planned for, in its fullness and variability, by any central intelligence.

I have always found ecological metaphors compelling. When Burke argues that the state evolved over the ages, 'the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it', I find it intuitively plausible. (Whether 'entailed inheritance' of the precise structure of society is the only means of protecting the transmission of this happy effect - and indeed whether it's actually all that happy - is a different mattter.) Burke goes on to say:

By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of Providence, and handed down, to use and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts...