Free Markets
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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.
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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.
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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…
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How Countries Can Avoid the Middle-Income Trap
To get out of the middle-income trap, the country must change from the imitative economy to an innovative economy. Instead of a top-down transformation, the economy needs to blossom from below.
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Predatory Pricing: More Theory Than Reality
All governments and all courts everywhere would, if they were sincerely committed to keeping markets as competitive as possible, announce loudly and unconditionally that never again will they take accusations of predatory pricing seriously.
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When “Democracy” Becomes a Threat to Liberty
Friends of freedom, including many of those who strongly believed in and fought for representative and democratically elected government in the 18th and 19th centuries, often expressed fearful concerns that “democracy” could, itself, become a threat to the liberty of many of the very people that democratic government was supposed to protect from political abuse.
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The Philosophical Reason for the Attacks on Free Speech
In the old days, people associated the Left with an ethos akin to the ACLU today: the right to speak, publish, and associate. The turn that took place with the New Left actually flipped whatever remaining attachment that the old left had with freedom.
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High Regulation Causes Unwarranted Consolidation
If we are concerned about the rise of the ginormous corporation, and perhaps we should be, why not start with lowering barriers to entry, removing regulations, cutting more taxes, blasting away expensive mandates and litigation landmines? If we work toward a truly laissez-faire environment for business, we could let the market discover the right combination…
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Big Data and Central Planning
Does the rise of big data make Marx’s centrally planned utopia feasible? The answer is a big no.
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What Anthony Bourdain Taught Me About Economics
“As Bourdain himself says at the outset, with the focus on food and cooking, we can see what it is that drives daily life among the Haitian multitudes. He takes viewers to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Through this micro lens, we gain more insight than we would have if the program were entirely focused on economic issues.”…
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Freedom, Love, and the Vision of Edith Wharton
Wharton was the mind that gave the most rich and complex expression of the glory and failings of this fascinating time and place. She clearly loved freedom, and despised impositions on the human personality, which is why she was one of the few literary giants of her time to see the power of Aldous Huxley’s…
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Swift vs. Sweep: The Eternal Battle
There’s something about the physical experience of a spot like Cotswold Cottage at the American Institute for Economic Research that connects you to the deep past, in all its tribulations and struggle for progress, but also points to a brilliant future. Sometimes we need experiences like this to cause reflection of where we’ve been and…
