Paid Subscriber Content: Diary of a Dissenter

The Week from My Window

Unlikely Shills?

SATURDAY

It is 298 years since Bernard Mandeville wrote an essay titled The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, about the paradoxical and complex relationship between private vices and public virtues, between doing good and doing evil. The central idea was that envy, competition and exploitation, rather than charity, sel…