Art Carden
America Needs More McJobs
“The market process allows low-skill people to specialize in what they do best while freeing up high-skill people who can concentrate their efforts on things they do best. Everybody wins, and in some small way, you have a part in every achievement by every bleary-eyed customer for whom you dutifully pour coffee on their morning…
A Four Point Plan for Every City
“If you agree that local politics should be about protecting others’ liberty to become the people they want to become rather than giving you the tools to turn them into the people you want them to become, what should your city do?” ~ Art Carden
Do Your Civic Duty and Fill Out the Customer Survey
“Should you spend your time voting, preparing to vote, researching the candidates, and so on? Or should you take five or ten minutes to fill out the customer satisfaction survey that you were emailed after your last flight or hotel stay?” ~ Art Carden
Bill and Ted Take Joan of Arc to Walmart
“What I think is most striking about Walmart – and what I would hope Joan of Arc, Genghis Khan, Socrates, and others would notice – is that the floor-to-ceiling cornucopia is not restricted to the elites.” ~ Art Carden
Economic Growth Makes Graceland Less Impressive
“The real ‘capitalist achievement,’ however, isn’t Graceland. It’s the fact that compared to the stuff of the average person’s day-to-day life in 2023, Graceland just isn’t that impressive.” ~ Art Carden
Small Change: Let’s Put Pennies and Nickels to Rest
“If we don’t have the vision and political will to do something as unambiguously beneficial as to stop minting pennies and nickels, then perhaps ‘vision and political will’ aren’t going to give us the better future we want.” ~ Art Carden
Is It An Economic Crime To Import a Soccer Jersey?
“One of the hardiest and most enduring fallacies in economics is the mercantilist fallacy: buying from foreigners is bad for us because we should ‘keep the money here;’ selling to foreigners is good for us because we can pile up more money.” ~ Art Carden
“They Mean to Be Masters”: A Review of Trust Us
“The documentary considers the role experts assumed in the twentieth century: figuring out what you should do and how you should do it. You aren’t just to seek their counsel. You are to obey – or else.” ~ Art Carden
Two Ways Trade Creates Wealth
“You’ve heard the aphorism ‘one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.’ Trade turns trash into treasure by getting it out of one set of hands and into another.” ~ Art Carden
Four Ways to Get What You Want
“For most of our existence, life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short for pretty much everybody. Then we became a society of traders rather than a society of raiders.” ~ Art Carden
