Free Markets
|
The Walter Lippmann Colloquium and the Meaning of Liberalism
Eighty years after a remarkable colloquium in 1938, one that tried to assess the crisis of liberalism and what to do about it, the proceedings have finally been published. The results are tremendously revealing. The Walter Lippman Colloquium was indeed a seminal event that set the stage for the postwar liberal revival.
|
Everyone Is Missing the Point of 3D-Printed Guns
There is no chance of finally censoring the future with any of the tools that molded the past. It’s done, that great migration from a things-based economy regulated by the state to an idea-based economy regulated only by the choices of the individuals that make up society itself.
|
Andrea Rich, RIP
The movement as it was known has been through ups and downs but it has finally settled on what Andrea knew all along. Liberty is a big tent with many iterations. Its roots are not in mass political organizing but in beautiful ideals and dreams of a freer world.
|
What Can and Cannot Be Planned
No one created that muddy track; it is the result of individuals going where they want to go. But if enough people walk there, it wears out the grass and makes the ground hard and packed down. The “path” emerges, although no one planned it.
|
Anti-Market Atavism Explained
Moral norms that served small bands of humans well 10,000 years ago — share, cooperate, punish anyone who violates the rules — are no longer very good at helping people navigate commercial society. Ask someone about price-gouging laws, or kidney sales, or generally talk about the role of price as an indispensable signal of scarcity.…
|
Thanks to Capitalism, You Can Now Sleep Sitting Up
This pillow is not only a tribute to good engineering and good sense; it is a credit to a commercial system that enables and rewards innovation in service of the better life.
|
Online Taxes Could Suffocate Small Retailers
State and local governments don’t need any more of our money to feed their budgets through taxes, whether they’re taken from online sales or not. We should be free to drop whatever we want into our virtual (or real) shopping carts in peace without government sweeping in to get a cut.
|
Taylor Swift: Heroine for Property Rights
Swift has used her celebrity and art to stand up to bullies, whether they be corporations or colleagues in the music industry. She’s also singing her way to the bank.
|
Anne of Green Gables Shows that Crypto Scams Are Nothing New
That an asset or innovation is subject to scamery, pushed by grifters, invested in by the deluded and avaricious, does not mean it is not a good idea. You can observe the fallacy with any new discovery that has ever appeared in the history of humankind.
|
Directionalism vs. Destinationism
We can often make progress by pressing for improvement, rather than holding out for perfection. Sometimes, just the right kind of nothing is good enough.
|
How Technology Bolsters Your Right to Work, Choose, and Earn
The information economy has liberated those who do the work from servile dependency on any single capital-controlling employer. We didn’t need Karl Marx to invent a new political order to do that; we just needed a better software infrastructure.
|
Socialism, Like Dracula, Rises Again From the Grave
How very appealing was the socialist idea in the late 19th and early (pre-WWI) 20th centuries! All the burdens of life and everyday work, all the seemingly unjust inequalities of material wealth observable in society, and all the uncertainties of health care and old age would be lifted from the weary shoulders of the common…
