Kira asks Leo, "This isn't a joke you're playing on me, is it? Or have you lost your mind entirely?" Leo replies, "I'm glad to find some use for it."  This neutering of the mind continues at Pavel Syerov's house party, the one celebrating Morozov's business deal with Leo that will make the three of them wealthy,

People are finally looking beyond BLM’s catchy slogan and evaluating the actual agenda. The agenda is Karl Marx’s anti-God, pro-communism political theory. BLM scrubbed its “what we believe” page because smart people are distancing themselves from BLM.

The real culprit behind worsening polarization is the gargantuan federal government that has turned the entire country into an unceasing political battleground. When virtually all political issues are settled at the national level, the whole nation becomes a source of potential political opponents.

Even if we were to exclude Syria from the list of U.S. wars, that would still leave the U.S. bearing at least partial responsibility for wars that have displaced 30 million people since 2001. That is a staggering number, and it is one that we cannot forget when we talk about ending endless wars.

How long can a state suffer the rich Bourbons of the Bay Area? As long as its brave nobodies still drive ’dozers right into conflagrations to create lifesaving fire breaks, as long as unheralded pilots fly blind into smoke to drop fire retardant, and as long as there is something left for the parasitical elite of the rich inheritance from California’s brilliant and industrious but now long-dead past.

Things are getting worse. Intellectual error has become a threat to the well-being of the nation. A truly massive tragedy is building.” Schools “are diminishing our national unity and our basic competence.”

Victoria is now a police state. That is the simple and depressing truth of all this. If the government feels that you are standing in the way of its goals, then your freedoms are forfeited and you will be arrested. If you leave your house after 8pm, you will be fined. If you visit your father on Father’s Day, you will be fined. And if you protest against any of this, you will be arrested.

Harms from distance learning include, by one estimate, a 30% drop in reading ability and a 50% decline in math skills. Children need socializing, too: “They don’t go to school just to learn what’s in a book.” They learn “maturation, conflict resolution, physical fitness.”

The Plato/Socrates version may well have been satirical; the notion of the “Noble Lie” may have been a kind of goof on the idea of self-important leaders. But the modern Bernie Sanders / Elizabeth Warren "social justice" version is decidedly unironic, and therefore more dangerous by far.

We think of social media with its inescapable cacophony as a force dividing us. But the problem is our assumption that “united” means “doing and thinking the same thing.” Ironically, exactly this networked technology enables us to think and do different things while remaining connected rather than isolated, and therefore, be greater than the sum of our parts.

Looking at the last century, should we count two bloody world wars, central banking and fiat currencies, income taxes, the rise of managerial superstates, vast social insurance and welfare programs, and diminutions of property rights unimaginable to our grandparents as liberal successes?

The eminently wise Gen Z'er Kira has exposed Rand's sense of humor and Pavel's greatest weakness - he has nothing without public cooperation. She knows that his object is unearned wealth, his carrot is social justice, and his stick is his criminal gang. Greed, envy, and fear - and today's Democratic party.

Everywhere the language is changing. “The New Normal” was about beating Covid19, but now it’s about “covid19 and future pandemics”, or the “other colossal challenges facing humanity”….which can mean literally anything they want it to mean. All this is based on the ever-increasing number of cases, without any reference to the fact deaths are falling.

In 1992, rapidly deflating technologies made up about 0.5% of world GDP, 1% in 2004 and it stands today at 2%. Consider how many consumer electronics devices have been stuffed into that rapidly deflating iPhone. With self-driving cars, 3D printers and AI just over the horizon, more and more of the economy is going to become subject to rapid technological deflation.

Cato's Letters remind us how far we have moved from what George Washington described as “the sacred fire of liberty … staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people,” making their insights worth reconsideration. The upcoming November elections coincide with the letters' 300th anniversary.

Traditional American civic postulates support individual freedom and the limits of governments, as well as universal principles of human rights. If liberty means anything, it means that we are not locked down. It means, moreover, that lockdowns are unconscionable.

One of the basic building blocks of economics is that both parties benefit from voluntary exchanges ex ante, or else they would not be willing to engage in it. The fact that consumers use Big Tech to the extent they do is overwhelming evidence of their value.

Perhaps this is a case of Rothbardian-style lost knowledge, similar to how humanity once understood scurvy and then didn’t and then had to come to understand it again. Somehow in the 21st century, we find ourselves in the awkward position of having to relearn the basics of immunology.

Champions of free markets regularly point out that capitalism has made life easier, safer and longer. This is true and worthy of celebration. But humanity is an existential species: People want more than safe and comfortable lives; they want their struggles to matter.

If you are going to push such a line in the face of the mounting evidence showing them to be frauds, if you are going to lie with impunity to keep the game going, you will have to steel yourself against emotion and empathy. You become a sociopath. This might be enough to account for their bloodless posturing.

Over the last 20 years, the falling default rate has also closely mirrored the slowdown in U.S. productivity, which is not surprising. Keeping profitless companies alive naturally retards productivity. A 2017 OECD study found that “zombie congestion” in any industry lowers the productivity of rival companies—and blocks the entry of new companies—by making it difficult to attract capital.

Jason has thought deeply about – and codified - his own values. He includes them in his personal profile on his entrepreneurial distribution platform, Outkick. He cites Booker T. Washington as one of his guides. The entrepreneurial life is a values-driven life.

The beak of the mask would be filled with herbs and spices that would produce pleasant smells, which were believed to protect the wearer from invisible “poisonous emanations” in the air, called “miasma,” which created harmful imbalances in a person’s “humors,” or bodily fluids. 

It’s easy to point out how senseless and counterproductive this boycott is. Founded in 1936 by Mr. Unanue’s Spanish immigrant grandparents, the company is a living example of the American Dream. Mr. Unanue hopes his company’s story will inspire other Latino entrepreneurs. He was praised by Michelle Obama for Goya’s big role in her healthy-food initiative. None of it matters to AOC and her comrades.

These People incessantly display utter ignorance of – or contempt for – basic economic realities. These People have done so for generations. Much of what These People say about economic matters is the economic equivalent of voodoo, and even more of what they do on the economic front is destructive.

As any student of human nature knows, people who do not benefit personally from their hard work tend not to work all that hard. The upshot was that more was taken than given. Imagine that.

To be grateful for our liberties and civilization and never think they can be taken for granted is perhaps the most valuable lesson. Many intelligent people have lost faith in the news, rediscovered frugality, and found a new way to commit themselves to the defense of liberty and human rights.

Things evolve but never actually become better adapted, because threats are always changing. Black Rhinos survived for 8 million years before being killed off by poachers. Lehman Brothers adapted and prospered for 150 years and 33 recessions before mortgage-backed securities. Poof, gone.

Smith wrote: “Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.

We must make the building of a free society once more an adventure, a deed of courage, a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds and best entrepreneurs. If we can regain our belief in the power of ideas, the battle is not lost.

If those who protest and complain today were themselves to adopt the entrepreneurial spirit in their own lives, they would find that they could not only build better platforms for progress, but also introduce more purpose, meaning and autonomy into their own lives.

Albert Camus said: "When a war breaks out, people say "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though a war may well be 'too stupid', that doesn't prevent it lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way." Indeed it is true.

The lesson here is quite clear. When the government launches massive interventions into the economy, political distortions will result in costs disproportionately borne by disadvantaged groups in society and benefits that skew toward the well-connected.

What people on the right do, you can say in one word. They practice deference. We defer more and more to the moralism of the left. Will that get it? The left comes back with something else for us to prove our innocence. That's power in American life today.

It is the individual that matters, not the collective that he or she belongs to. Only an individual can act to pursue his or her own happiness. A collective does not have feelings of happiness or anything else. Only individuals do.

We either passively accept a centralized future, where the individual becomes irrelevant, valueless, and expendable, or we reclaim control, through the principles of subsidiarity, in which decisions are made on the lowest possible level and all voices are heard.

Practices such as civil asset forfeiture become attached to the police uniform in the minds of civilians. Many cops, I’m sure, would never steal a person’s life savings or confiscate their legally owned property just because the law allows them to do so—but the law does allow them to

It's true the responsibility for the riots lies primarily with the rioters. But we cannot deny that policymakers fuel the flames of conflict when they outlaw jobs and destroy people's social support systems by cutting them off from their communities.

Congress should take a cue from President Trump and employ deregulation as an engine of economic recovery. If government simply relaxed its grip on the economy, then entrepreneurship, innovation, and investment — the drivers of growth - would flourish on their own accord.

Politicians' panic led to exponentially more unemployment and long-term agony than would have been the case had they simply told us adults to be careful. In short, let’s not let the political class hide behind a lack of knowledge and “China.” They need to pay at the ballot box.

Work from anywhere at any time would similarly have been a challenge. Not only was internet service much slower twenty years ago, not only was so much dial-up, most if not all online connections involved a cord. No moving around the apartment or house to work from anywhere. Assuming you had home internet, it was going to be utilized from a specific location.

Four infectious disease doctors in Canada estimate that the individual rate of death from COVID-19 for people under 65 years of age is six per million people, or 0.0006 per cent – 1 in 166,666, which is “roughly equivalent to the risk of dying from a motor vehicle accident during the same time period.”

Our evolved physiological makeup disposes us to fear all sorts of actual and potential threats, even those that exist only in our imagination. The people who have the effrontery to rule us, who call themselves our government, understand this basic fact of human nature. They exploit it, and they cultivate it.

They get into politics precisely because they want to wield this monopolistic, totalitarian power against their fellow citizens, whom they often despise and hate, publicly labeling them with such words as “deplorable” and much worse. 

Many parents who were on autopilot may suddenly be realizing that public schools—even when they were physically open—weren't that much of a bargain after all. Parents can suddenly see exactly what is being taught to their children. They can see the quality of the teachers. They can learn about the content of the educational materials. Many parents may not like what they see,

Fear and want are subjective. Poverty is the absence of wealth. If no man should ever stand naked, who is to produce clothes? Who is to have absolute power over every person? The only condition in which no one can experience poverty, want, or fear, is rigor mortis.

Virtually all Democratic Governors have overreached their legitimate mandates, and few show any inclination to relinquish their newfound authority. These governors behave as if they recognize no legal boundaries.

Some especially out-of-touch pro-shutdown "COVID Warriors" rationalize it all by insisting that these prohibitions on earning a living are, as Dr. Anthony Fauci claims, mere inconveniences. It's easy to see why someone like Fauci might think this way. His government salary is $400,000 dollars, and there is little risk he'll be missing any mortgage payments any time soon. 

The only actions governments took was to collect data, watch and wait, encourage testing and vaccines, and so on. The medical community took the primary responsibility for disease mitigation, as one might expect. It was widely assumed that diseases require medical not political responses.

Every mediocrity with the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors, is the foulest of creatures. The double-parasite who lives on the sores of the poor and blood of the rich, whom men have come to regard as the moral ideal.

The correlation coefficient between deaths per million and the speed and degree of imposition of shutdowns was 5.5%—so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and moved on to find the real cause of the problem.

Scientists are and should be skeptical, critical, and even unconvinced. They should disagree. It is how our accumulated knowledge grows and is refined. Unfortunately, society has adopted a form of unreflective and normative scientism in which science is assumed to immediately have all the answers.

The Mother of All Demos was presented by Douglas Engelbart 52 years ago in San Francisco. Its goal was to show how technology could augment the capabilities of the human mind. For the first time in the history, the windows graphic user interface, hypertext, display monitor, word processing, file linking, keyboard and mouse were on display.

Many states, cities and counties are about to, suddenly, run out of money. Wages won’t be paid. Services won’t be delivered. Institutions will shut down abruptly. Many state colleges may fold.

Because our prices are so low, the quality light is even brighter on us. We have to be even more transparent in our quality metrics than the person who is charging ten times a much. The average hospital infection rate, nationwide, is 3 - 6%, the average surgery center is about 2.6%, but in 2012, the infection rate at SCO was zero.

Practical wisdom might warn that one does not erode the Constitution because of a mysterious virus, even though Bill Gates or Anthony Fauci believe their expertise leads them to think it may be a good idea.

Those individuals who obtain and retain positions of power in government tend to be those who are most interested in possessing and exercising such power. For each crisis, then, the likelihood is that the ideology of the holders of power prompts them, not to keep their power in check, but to expand it.

Murray's 1973 book, The Libertarian Manifesto, "More than any other of his works, this book explains why Rothbard seems to grow in stature every year. His influence has vastly risen since his death, and why Rothbardianism has so many enemies on the left, right, and center."

Having wrecked citizens' economic situations via lockdown, politicians - who bring new meaning to self-unaware - arrogated to themselves even more of the wealth always and everywhere produced in the private sector with an eye on sending checks to individuals and businesses.

Now is a good time for us to imagine, what if those who work inside the cab of big rig or delivery van, ICU or urgent care clinic, warehouse or supermarket decided to go on strike? Most likely, they would be vilified by national and social media nitwits for price gouging.

The projections of the models are worthless at best, misleading at worst, and provide the fuel for government misbehavior. The credibility of models and modelers has taken a fatal blow.

It is interesting that Sweden—the one European country that did not want to shut its borders, did not close schools, and has not banned gatherings of fewer than 500 people—so far seems to be containing the spread better than other countries have.

The distinguishing characteristic of Vermeer's paintings was his portrayal of pure, radiant, austere light. It is this combination of subject and style that expose the Poetic Justice of Johannes Vermeer's sense of human consciousness, our life's efficacy, and its proper method of functioning. Reason, purpose, pride.

The CDC does not have a solution, but it also becomes the classic blocker to progress. Labs cannot act without a lengthy approval process from CDC and the FDA. These government controls violate the principle of subsidiarity (problems should be solved at the lowest level possible).

A no pain no gain mindset, and high intensity interval training, are probably bad decisions for most people. In personal finance, bad decisions involve maximum risk tolerance, market forecasts, faulty return projections, beating the market, and staying the course.

I know that social democratic policies are emotionally appealing.  That’s why they’ve won.  Yet objectively speaking, market capitalism should have won because market capitalism offers much better results.

Today, however, we are seeing the impoverishing downside of decades of political centralization in both the US and Europe. Government regulations decreed from Brussels and Washington continue to stifle innovation and entrepreneurship. The antidote to all of this is to decentralize.

Grandin's breakthrough, not considered possible for people living with autism at the time, was her successful integration of scientific inquiry, animal husbandry, and object-visual thinking into a highly productive career. This is the essence of the economic way, and active minds, "The thing about being autistic is that you gradually get less autistic, you keep learning, you keep learning how to behave."What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool? You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done.

We’re bombarded by news reports and campaign ads boasting of how this president or that governor “created” millions of new jobs. Such claims are on a moral and intellectual par with my claim that I deserve credit for not killing pedestrians with my car.

Like venture capitalists, Rockefeller Foundation is to fund a sustainable business that will eventually build out all those electricity grids. Africa is next, where a lack of electricity helps keep 400 million in poverty.

Should they not heed his call for “mutual forbearances and temporizing yieldings on all sides”, he feared for the governance of the country: “Without these I do not see how the Reins of Government are to be managed, or how the Union of the States can be much longer preserved.”

Investors, always looking into the future, had to price in the possibility of major change in Washington; major change that would have a global impact. This perhaps explains a global rout for shares. Sanders was a big surprise that investors had to price.

Because they act as a favor to entrenched industry insiders, Competitor’s Veto laws violate the Constitution’s promise of economic liberty, that is, the right to earn a living free of irrational government interference.

Once discarded, they take up little room in landfills. They don’t release greenhouse gases like decomposing paper and cotton bags. The plastic bags’ tiny quantity of carbon goes back underground, where it can be safely sequestered from the atmosphere and ocean.

Economics must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices and must not be left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything.

I’m more motivated to change this law than anything I’ve ever worked on because it has such a direct and negative impact on peoples’ lives. I believe very deeply in economic freedom, the right to pursue your calling. AB5 is a grave moral offense.

Just what are conservatives so afraid of? If Huawei is truly a tool of the state as they want to believe, and as they keep telling us, then it’s a safe bet that its efforts to lead the world toward an amazing 5G-enhanced future will fall very short.

These stories, says Shiller, shape policy. Allan Sproul, the recently retired president of the Fed at that time, lamented that the “Federal Reserve System finds itself in the position of having to validate public folly and private greed by supporting increased costs and prices”.

Most research has pointed towards the understanding that psychopaths are born, not made and therefore cannot be cured. By attempting to heal or help a psychopath, you might actually be strengthening their cunning abilities, as they will find a way to manipulate you

A rich society that is not living up to its potential due to economic repression, i.e., restrictions on economic freedom, is a tragedy, even if it is more difficult to commiserate with people in such societies compared to those forced to live (often literally) in impoverished lands.

The trend attracts the megaliths of the agricultural industry to step in, having realised that the “plant-based” lifestyle generates large profit margins, adding value to cheap raw materials (such as protein extracts, starches, and oils) through ultra-processing.

Climatologist Patrick J. Michaels calculated that if the United States eliminated all carbon emissions – which would not only require Americans to give up fossil fuels, but also to stop breathing (to cease exhaling carbon dioxide) – it would only reduce global warming by a negligible 0.052° C by 2050.

We're told that if Californians and New Yorkers have an overwhelming number of votes, then that's just tough luck for everyone else. The minority must do what the majority says, even if those people have very different interests from the majorities in New York or California.

Looked at through the prism of the individual, the easy answer for economic growth is always to remove or reduce the tax, regulatory, monetary and tariff barriers that invariably harm individuals.

Yesterday’s values prepared blacks to walk through the doors of opportunity opened to them through civil rights. Family, faith, character and moral behavior were all crucial to their victories. Today’s social-justice warriors trade on the currency of oppression.

Not everybody understands that these annoyances are the result of mandates handed down by a few unelected bureaucrats sitting in cubicles in Washington, D.C. By exposing the link, there's a better chance of creating legions of small-government advocates than via lectures about Adam Smith.

What is a master but a master student? And if that's true, then there's a responsibility on you to keep getting better and to explore avenues of your profession." Neil Peart's first master instructor was the legendary jazz drummer Gene Krupa.

The likelihood that someone would only ever experience either good or bad luck during their lifetime is very low. Over many years and decades, in most cases, good and bad luck should balance each other out.

Regulators are those who mostly didn't rate acceptance at elite institutions, plus it cannot be stressed enough that for the most part those who presume to regulate are the ones who couldn’t get jobs in the industries regulated.

We forget that knowledge can be found at all ages, and in all places. And ethics has nothing to do with degrees or pedigrees.

We have an implicit [but wrong] assumption that intelligence and rationality go together—or else why would we be so surprised when smart people do foolish things?

Because the Manifesto features twelve behaviors and philosophical principles, twelve individuals have been selected who are exponents for the value system that drives their heightened sense of reality

Asset price inflation destroys the purchasing power of money in the same way that price inflation of consumer goods does. If stock prices rise from, say, $100 to $200, the purchasing power of the money unit would drop by 50 percent. The owner of the stock becomes richer, while the holder of dollars become poorer.

Contrary to progressive belief, America is not divided into rigid economic strata. The incomes of the wealthy often decline, while many taxpayers go from being poor at one point to not-poor at another.

Arthur Diamond helps us understand where new ideas come from, how they diffuse, how they improve people's lives and importantly, how they can be throttled by regulators, special interests, and even cultural commentators.

I’ve lived in this city for almost 20 years, supporting my family thanks to the full-service-restaurant industry. Today I’m struggling because of a policy meant to help me. I’m proudly progressive in my politics, but my experience shows that progressives should reconsider minimum-wage laws that hurt the very workers they’re trying to protect.

Nobel Laureate Robert J. Shiller explains why this may be the case in his new book, “Narrative Economics.” As Shiller points out, when a story is repeated enough, the viral message may be accepted as conventional wisdom, more like an article of belief than a matter of reason

In the free market society - and only there - people are morally and legally viewed as sovereign individuals possessing rights to their life, liberty, and honestly acquired property, who may not be coerced.

The fourth grade students interviewed in the original 1979 60 Minutes feature were asked who their favorite authors were. Some of the answers were Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Chaucer, or Kipling. One learning method was Socratic dialogue, and years later Collins explained that since they're great at memorizing rap lyrics, Plato becomes easy. Many went on to wonderful careers in law, medicine, business, and education.

The creation of an implied multi-tier justice system expressly violates our fundamental value of the law applying equally to citizens from all walks of life and most importantly results in the increasingly intolerable and dangerous conditions existing on the streets.

Elite liberals too often talk about patriotism as if it’s a set of blinders preventing Americans from recognizing their country’s flaws. Likewise, conservative elites dismiss patriotism as a trifle to be set aside when there are higher investment returns to chase or markets to open.

The concept of social justice is rooted in the Marxist theory of man-made exploitation. Advocates of social justice argue that social inequalities are based upon the fact that those who have access to resources, do so because they have deprived the have-nots of these same opportunities.

The ultimate values are the values of the individuals who form the society; there are no superindividual values or ends. Nations may be convenient administrative units; nationalism is an alien creed.

Western governments could have chosen to leave people alone, they did not. They could have chosen sound money, they chose political fiat. They could have chosen peace, they chose entanglements.

Few regular people possess the resources necessary to mount a defense against the Justice Department's gargantuan budgets and legions of attorneys that can be aimed at any American who becomes annoying to these federal law enforcement bureaucrats and their friends.

What we are watching now is the slow burn of our democracy, not at the hands of Donald Trump, but by the Left and its eager servants in the swamp.

In the mind of this mid-level bureaucrat, American foreign policy is set not by elected officials in Washington DC, but by the bureaucrats themselves.

What bothers the opponents of environmental activism is not the environmentally conscious goals or even facts presented, but the activists’ blatant hypocrisy and aura of sanctimonious religiosity.

The definition of liberalism changed within the West itself, expanding to include values such as ethnic diversity and LGBT rights after politicians embraced what he calls left-liberal democracy. Liberalism no longer solves the people's problems.

The primary losers in this formula are middle-class workers. Between the loss of jobs and revenue, these states and cities press even harder on millions of middle-income taxpayers to make up the difference.

Harper Lee's masterpiece was an enlightening study of human nature. Her characterization of Finch illustrated the classical liberal values of self-reliance, compassion, tolerance, justice, and most of all, the essential role of a loving, dedicated father in the life of a child. Yet, there were very few examples of fatherly affection or life lessons in the play - the children were played by young adults.

Socialist tyrants were the greatest mass murderers in history, and the young must be apprised of this melancholy fact. “Stalin ranks just behind Mao as history’s second greatest mass murderer, with Hitler coming in third—all committed socialists of one sort or another.”

Another Big Myth: because all that is good in our social and economic relations is made possible by the state, each of us is deeply and forever in debt to the state. The state is supposed to be owed by each of us everlasting thanks and offerings.

Campus activism has replaced the old university creed of disinterested inquiry. Students are starting to resemble military recruits in boot camp, prepping to become hardened social-justice warriors on the frontlines of America’s new wars over climate change, gun control, abortion, and identity politics

Yet when a company adopts a new technology, it can’t set it and forget it. Staying ahead requires new features and constant upgrades. Hopper described a “technology treadmill” and said “companies will either master and re-master the technology or die.”

The innovation they came up with was Dematerialization. McAfee defines this term to mean the phenomenon of consuming more and more while taking less and less from the planet. The intense competitive improvement mechanism of capitalism caused more and more companies to seize the opportunity.

What will this legally imposed veneer of corporate morality look like? It’s clear from Warren’s campaign materials that it will involve a new and large bureaucracy, but the rules to be enforced are less clear. In short, accountable capitalism means government mandating that corporations do what Elizabeth Warren wants them to do.

The forces of enterprise and innovation are infinitely more powerful than governments. Governments have only edicts and guns to enforce them. Ideas, on the other hand, take flight because they enter into the human imagination, spread like wildfire, and construct the narrative of history itself. 

Free trade simply means the absence of government action, leaving people free to exchange goods and services across national borders. To have free trade, governments do not have to do anything; they simply have to stop doing things, such as imposing duties and tariffs or imposing regulatory barriers.

In 2010 the bourgeoisie fought back. A grassroots movement, mostly consisting of people who are not politically active, became fed-up with ever growing government power and debt. Local Tea Party groups organized themselves all of the country and found a champion with a massive audience and political influence in Rush Limbaugh.

Big Brother has for decades been systematically wiping out competing forces in all three countries, hollowing out institutions that previously ordered society — family, religion, cultural cohesiveness. Everywhere, the family is in crisis. Marriage rates are at record lows as government programs systematically undermine the institution.

Our society’s obsession with the president is both a cause and a consequence of his immense power. Public policy today is almost exclusively directed from the Oval Office and so, of course, we end up paying a lot of attention to the chief executive.

On the subject of climate change abatement, the absence of rational analysis and the willful ignorance of facts is counterproductive. Rather than promoting a feasible approach to dealing with climate change, the magnitude of which remains uncertain, the focus is on unfeasible approaches and unachievable goals.

How long will Silicon Valley’s leaders accept these conditions? Both Lyft and Uber have shifted some of their operations out of state, Lyft to Nashville and Uber to north Dallas. Apple has opened a huge new operation in the suburbs outside Austin. But there may be no escape if the ascendant Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders ends up in the White House.

Government measures economic activities that can be tracked, counted, and ranked based on dollar values and production totals, and reports them as having value. But there is an enormous amount of human effort that goes to activities that produce well-being and cannot be measured in this way.

He knew despair as well as anyone, and he knew redemption even more. He paid it forward with the morality and resources of a successful capitalist. As the novel marvelously illustrates, Valjean had respect and compassion for the aspirations of his employees, customers and strangers.

For relatively low acquisition costs, drones and integrated devices such as cameras and sensors can become complete data collection systems for real estate, construction, agriculture, and security. Barriers to entry are low.

The claim about youth’s transformative commitment to radical environmental change is bunk. People give up what they’re willing to give up. One’s own habits are necessary, their behavior tells us; it’s everyone else’s that need to change.

Since the telescope was first patented in 1611, the discoveries that have been made on it have changed the way we view the known universe. It's hardly a humble device. Because our limited human eyes can only see so much, the telescope has helped us look into the beyond.

Bastiat's greatest contribution is that he took the discourse out of the ivory tower and made ideas on liberty so clear that even the unlettered can understand them and statist's cannot obfuscate them. Clarity is crucial to the moral superiority of personal liberty.

“The mind can never foresee its own advance” is one of Hayek’s most quoted lines. Hayek adds, “Though we must always strive for the achievement of our present aims, we must also leave room for new experiences and future events to decide which of these aims will be achieved.”

What do we actually mean by “progress”? How should it be measured and monitored, and who experiences it? For many reasons, the standard indicator of real GDP growth, which leaves out much of what people value, will no longer do. 

American prosperity involves “creative destruction": obsolete activities and technologies disappear (the destruction), and capital shifts from old uses to more productive ones (the creation). Government efforts to save or bail out companies that stick with outmoded products, services, or management methods protect the existing order at the expense of innovation, growth, and future jobs.

The current economic environment—low and declining interest rates, stable prices, modest quarter-to-quarter economic growth, the absence of wars abroad—does not suggest a recession-oriented climate. Recessions typically occur in settings of rapid economic growth and rising interest rates, combined with overly bullish forecasts for stocks and business profits. That’s not the situation today.

The message I had expected to be controversial, was old hat to the industry folks. But it was beside the point, because recycling was for them a moral imperative. Once you begin to think of recycling as a symbol of religious devotion rather than a pragmatic solution to environmental problems, the whole thing makes more sense.

Brazil’s fiscal incontinence is legendary. The number of civil servants grew by 60% between 1995 and 2016, to 12m. Since public-sector workers cannot be fired or have their pay cut, they become a permanent expense once hired. Nearly 80% of government spending in Brazil goes on salaries and pensions. “Instead of a state that serves the public, you have a state that serves the state."

When I assess President Trump’s economic policy, I generally…

Imagine the costs and inconvenience we’d suffer if people were generally dishonest and we couldn’t trust anyone. We would have to lug around measuring instruments to ensure, for example, that it was ten gallons of gas and one pound of steak we purchased.

Our graduates have a sort of wisdom that is really rare in today’s culture. They have learned how to write clearly and eloquently. They have drawn inspiration from countless, beautiful works of literature. They have learned things in science where they can look at the world and see order and intelligibility. We don't talk about college.

The value to Pulitzer's donors was the concretization of one of their highest values - liberty, integrated in to a work of great art that lights the way to a future as it could and should be. From New York Harbor, Liberty gazes east and encourages people to take pride in the fact that you can do this too - through value creating capitalism.

Almost no one has abandoned modern society to return to a happy, integrated life of fixed poverty. And perhaps the most conspicuous non-withdrawers from society are those very critics who use our modern “alienated” mass communications to denounce modern society.

Inflationism, however, is not an isolated phenomenon. It is only…

Communities offer their members a sense of identity, a sense of place and belonging that will survive the trials and tribulations of modern life. When faced with a choice between self-interest and community interest, or between community members and others, members are more inclined to put their own community first.

The nature of the entrepreneurial system is that both consumers and producers experience reward when one responds to the other in a way that aligns what the consumer wants with what the entrepreneur can provide. It’s a collaborative win-win, and society (i.e. all the producers and consumers rolled up) progresses and improves.

Politicians perform ostentatious displays of publicity and political activists take to social media with grand condemnations of “social injustice” because there is social currency to be gained from doing so. The rules of the game call for it. Don't expect any real action to follow.

A periodic “spring cleaning for the regulatory state” is essential if we hope to address regulatory accumulation. For starters, we need to get rid of the problem of over-licensing and over-permitting. “Permissionless innovation” should be the default.

The idea of Bitcoin inevitability does not mix well with the logic of markets. We need markets and competition precisely because as human beings we have nowhere near the information or capacity necessary to make deterministic statements about the future. The future of money will likely look nothing like any of the possibilities we currently imagine.

Legislators should not be too hasty in altering the employment status of gig economy workers unless they want to bear the responsibility of rendering the sector completely nonexistent in the process.

All jobs if well done are virtuous and bring dignity to those performing them, no matter how menial or trivial they may appear to be. All ways of making a living are of equal moral value.

The value that the Founders placed on self-reliance and entrepreneurship can be seen in the way that they lived their lives. Benjamin Franklin -- the original self-made man -- attributed his success chiefly to his own initiative. “Energy and persistence,” he wrote, “conquer all things.”

Devaluation exists as a horrid tax on investment. Why put money to work if the exchangeable value of future monetary returns - already risky in the first place - is being shrunken by monetary authorities?

Today the rigid orthodoxy of Progressive Leftism prevails in the land.  It is a noxious compound of several related tendencies and opinions, including the application of radical doubt about the nature of reality, the widespread acceptance of moral relativism, and the imposition of political correctness.

Smith’s first published book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759], is a study on how we humans develop shared ideas of fairness and morality. Our morality is not derived from a divinely inspired moral sense. It is the result of a triangulation between an actor, an action, and a viewer.

To quote Adam Smith again, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest". If they know what others need in order to feel more valuable, entrepreneurs can design and offer products and services to meet that need.

What makes our values right and theirs wrong? Why should our views and values prevail? Under our Constitution, many practices are protected — abortion, blasphemy, pornography, flag-burning, trashing religious beliefs — that other nations regard as symptoms of a disintegrating society.

Last week’s disappointing jobs number, as well as major downward…

The capitalist bears the risk of potential losses. Appetite for risk is in limited supply. Most people are not willing to risk losing their own funds (or borrowed funds that they will have to repay) in the event their produced goods are not valued by consumers at a price higher than the production costs.

Pop quiz: what’s the most economically significant difference…