Imagens de Portugal

Shaleen Title, Commissioner of the Cannabis Control Commission

«Couldn’t this policy make dangerous drugs more available to those who currently have no access to them?

Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001, and there were fears that by taking away criminal penalties, crime and drug-use rates would go up. That hasn’t happened. Several Massachusetts legislators recently visited Portugal to try to learn from that model because it was so successful.»

Fotografia de Joanne Rathe/Boston Globe Staff

Instituições

Sem uma perspetiva institucional de longo prazo o custo das mudanças são maximizadas e, assim, muitas vezes, a eficácia da democracia é intermitente. Enquanto os recursos e as circunstâncias oscilam os objetivos são dispersados.

É necessário adicionar na sociedade portuguesa uma instituição, a Instituição Real, propiciadora de permanente conversação democrática, visando o consenso estratégico, sem o qual, todos os esforços se esvaem.

Liberals have forgotten

«Liberals have forgotten that their founding idea is civic respect for all. Our centenary editorial, written in 1943 as the war against fascism raged, set this out in two complementary principles. The first is freedom: that it is "not only just and wise but also profitable...to let people do what they want". The second is the common interest: that "human society...can be an association for the welfare of all". (...) The Economist was founded to campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws. (...) We where created to take the part of the poor against the corn-cultivating gentry [people of good social position]. (...) [And we] liberals designed the welfare state.»    

Beddoes, Susan Minton et al. (2018, September 15^th). A manifesto. Success has turned liberals into a complacent elite. It is time to rekindle the spirit of radicalism, The Economist, p.11-12.

Relevante

Moritz Schularick

«The more financially integrated a country is, the more it aims to protect itself  from the risks stemming from such finantial openess. This collective policy of self-insurance against the vagaries of volatile finantial flows might have made individual countries safer, but not the world economy as a whole.»

M.Schularick, '140 Years of Financial Crisis: Old Dog, New Tricks', 2010