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.

What motive would others have to use a teenage girl to support their agenda?  The usual motive is money, and a lot of it: a Green New Deal for investment banks and other climate profiteers and a raw deal for everybody else.

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.

Democratic candidates are all saying they love jobs and opportunity, but with forked tongues. Out of the mouth’s other side, they’re saying opportunity will somehow be abundant in concert with the confiscation of wealth held by business owners. It can't be.

The intellectuals acquire a discontented frame of mind, and become resentful. Resentment rationalizes itself into the social criticism of the economic spectator. This, in turn, creates a hostile atmosphere surrounding the engine of capitalism.

Many Angelenos are doing the exact opposite of what Mr. Washington would like. Hugh Brockington, a musician who lives in the L.A. suburb of Pasadena, rode buses to auditions all over the city, until the frustration of slow travel got the better of his good intentions. “I just couldn’t do it anymore,” he said.

Cultural Marxism aims to destroy the family; mobilize women as revolutionaries against men, through aggressive feminism; encourage large-scale immigration to abolish national identity; create dependency on the state and state benefits; and control and infantilize the media.

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism. There must be people who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote.

In addition to economic prosperity, employment gives individuals a sense of dignity and self-sufficiency that helps them lead more fulfilling lives. Mame Mareme Cisse, another female employee at Skin Is Skin, explains, “This work has changed a lot in my life. Now I can provide everything I need for myself without having to ask anyone for it.”

While the printing press was changing the world, printed music was new because it was more difficult to create. Also, mass produced pianos were taking hold, and Beethoven saw the possibilities for being the first software publisher for this new hardware. As first mover to reach mass audiences, Beethoven stumbled across an abstract concept that had not yet been named: capitalism. For the first time in history, large swaths of humanity would soon enjoy the comforts previously reserved for royal court.

The businesses we created have employed hundreds of thousands of Americans. We have paid tens of billions of dollars in wages and contributed hundreds of billions to U.S. gross domestic product, and made the tens of millions of Americans who use our products and services better off. The Home Depot lowered hardware prices across the country.

The most important economic effect of population growth is the contribution of additional people to our stock of knowledge. This contribution is more than large enough to overcome the costs of population growth. The problem is not too many people, but lack of political and economic freedom. Profit is the only route to sustainability, it is up to entrepreneurs to save the world.

The phenomenal performance of innovation through businesses has not only been present in the transportation market but also in everything from faster internet to new varieties of beer, new medicines, and better delivery services. All of these things have been incentivized through the profit motive and made possible through the investment of part of that profit into R&D.

To make a judgment that the citizens should prefer clean energy and its cost structure requires an objective assessment of what they should be valuing. Such judgments are often made by experts, intellectuals, scientists, bureaucrats, and commentators.  Citizens’ perception of value is entirely subjective.

Here’s what not to do: force explicit, obnoxious, and controversial political messages into areas that are not inherently political. If you make kids’ movies like Disney, pressuring states to not adopt anti-abortion laws is actively trying to kill off your own target demographic.

For a quarter century now there has prevailed the myth of American middle-class economic stagnation. Specifically, this myth holds that ordinary Americans’ living standards hit a peak in the mid-1970s and have remained stagnant ever since. But the statistics used to tell the stagnation myth are seriously flawed.

Many younger Americans think collectivism is the answer to all of our current problems. Redistribute everything and spread the wealth. End inequality. Tax the rich harshly to help the poor. Is it really liberal to use identity politics as a means of judging people?

Venezuela’s institutional and cultural decline began in the 1970s with the nationalization of its oil industry and the state’s rapid encroachment into the economy. The last 50 years of Venezuelan economic history have been filled with sub-optimal economic interventions.

The climate change alarmists are given a free pass to throw out the most absurd rhetoric, such as a recent author’s warning that potentially billions of people could die because of human-caused climate change. Yet despite their claimed fidelity to the “consensus science,” such claims are not supported by the UN’s own climate change reports.

The national conservatism we are developing is going to have some hard edges and provoke some clever counterattacks and dismissals. The rancor proves the seriousness of the challenge we face.

In effect, debt financing allows government to spend money today while foisting the tab on future taxpayers – many of whom, literally, aren’t yet born. Politicians eager to win votes are thus prone to borrow and spend excessively because borrowing allows the current generation to free-ride on the incomes of future generations.

The literature on democracy and growth implies that there is no reason to reject an alternative history in which the world’s leading industrial economy was a nondemocracy. Nor why we could not see some very rich nondemocracies in the future.

When today's democratic socialists are asked to explain their ideology, they tend to skimp on the substantial structural questions and lean on paeans to dignity, generosity, and equality. Ocasio-Cortez defines it as "democratic participation in our economic dignity."

Income inequality stirs up emotions in many people, but sadly the first casualty to the passions is the truth. It is vital to factually evaluate inequality data, failure to do so will continue to enable the growth of the federal leviathan.

The modern state has acquired a crushing power and a police more effective than at any time in history. “No absolute monarch ever had at his disposal a police force comparable to those of modern democracies.” Power has continued and continues to grow.

The Founding Fathers understood liberty as the right of each individual to pursue his or her own desires, ambitions, and interests, so long as they did violate the rights of other individuals in the process. Thomas Jefferson enshrined liberty as a natural right in the Declaration of Independence.

The notion that public space is for any and all purposes can be found in opposition to so-called "hostile architecture." This is a term invented by activists who oppose the use of urban design to discourage the use of public spaces in ways not intended by the city or private owner.

Politicians think that somehow, the same government that started a war in Iraq on faulty intelligence, botched the launch of HealthCare.gov, gave us the Solyndra scandal and can keep neither Amtrak nor the Postal Service solvent, can effectively coordinate a strategic vision for American manufacturing.

FALC is a strong brew of technological determinism, sunny utopianism, and souped-up socialism: Let the robots do all the work, and let humans enjoy the fruits of their labor in equal measure. The idea has come into vogue over the past half-decade or so among progressive thinkers concerned about inequality and stagnation.

The decision is bad; it's an extension of the city's straw ban, plastic bag ban, and all the other Big Brother bans that make San Francisco more politically correct than liveable. Nothing is solved with these bans and quality of life is never improved any more than the earth is saved

Wages in May for nonsupervisory employees increased 3.4% year over year, the 10th consecutive month at or above 3%—after a stretch in which wage growth had been below 3% for every month since May 2009. The recent gains were even more significant for workers in traditional low-wage sectors.

The more politicians use the phrase “the American people,” I believe, the less they are to be trusted.

Many difficulties of coordination remain. But it’s interesting to think of just what can be accomplished even on this modest scale. Many of the problems of unaccountability in bureaucracy are solved, because the activities and prices are private bids.

The debate now over socialism versus capitalism conceals the cruder reality that the parties of the left—whether in the U.S., U.K., Germany or the nation-state of California—have come to regard the private sector as an alien tribe whose only function is to finance the public machinery that runs welfare, health and now climate protocols.

Tesla has generated almost $2 billion in revenue from selling regulatory credits since 2010. If manufacturers don’t sell enough non-polluting vehicles, they have to purchase credits from competitors like Tesla to make up the difference. The system is administered at the federal level by the EPA and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Negative interest rates? The very notion speaks to an artificial attempt to create what already exists (low-interest lending to concepts with certainty) without improving the economic outlook one iota. True growth is driven by surprise and uncertainty.

I would encourage graduates to marvel at the modern world. I would make clear that the best way for them to change the world — really, the only way to change it for the better — is to work to strengthen and spread the commitment to individual liberty and free markets.

Why do intellectuals, particularly university professors, resent capitalism? Simple, Mises explains: they resent the higher incomes and prestige of the risk-taking, entrepreneurial widget makers they look down upon.

Such harsh words are used about profit, and yet it is the social signal of approval. People who are benefiting from capitalism, like Hollywood celebrities and Silicon Valley billionaires, do not understand capitalism and decry it. What should entrepreneurs do? Just keep working at entrepreneurship.

The Earth's atoms may be fixed, but the possible combinations of those atoms are infinite. What matters, then, is not the physical limits of our planet, but human freedom to experiment and reimagine the use of resources that we have."

Life in Cuba is endless waits for seemingly everything, including basic items like spark plugs, car door latches and….sinks. The antiquated cars that populate the island are in such desperate shape that cabdrivers instruct passengers to very gingerly close their doors. Something as simple to fix (in the United States) as an inoperative door can take many months in Cuba.

This would leave Federal spending limited to: the military, debt service, retirement benefits for Federal employees, and "everything else." This too could eventually be cut in half over time. At present, these categories constitute 38% of Federal spending, or 7.9% of GDP. This reduced spending commitment could be funded with a much simpler tax system.

The Federal Reserve has been and is the root cause of all this monetary chaos and crises. That’s what central planning does. That’s what any socialist system does.

The executives and/or founders of large companies increasingly consider it their civic and moral duty to use the influences and powers of their businesses to censor or suppress political and/or inconvenient ideas they do not support or find offensive.

Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates, and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit.

Conservatives are often seen calling for reforms of government programs, and sometimes offer very specific suggestions. Libertarians call for repeal, abolition or dismantling of government programs.

It's bizarre is that people cannot even summarize the argument for capitalism coherently. At best, they might say something about self-interest, or freedom. That’s even the ones who like capitalism, mind you. The opponents will say something about greed, and inequality, and maybe exploitation.

Consider Gross Domestic Product, a production of the Bureau of Economic Analysis. It's this misguided accounting abstraction that has a president whom she despises ranting about so-called “deficits” in trade. But we have these “deficits” precisely because the U.S. is a magnet for both investment and imports.

Scarcity is not just a matter of how much there is of something (supply) but also considers how much people want something (demand). The higher the price, the greater the scarcity. The lower the price, the lesser the scarcity.

Here’s more good news. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “Between 1970 and 2017, the combined emissions of the six common pollutants (PM2.5 and PM10, SO2, NOx, VOCs, CO and Pb) dropped by 73%.”

Schumpeter’s first lesson: Change happens - but only in the right policy environment. Schumpeter's second lesson: Incentives matter. Entrepreneurs will continuously drive dynamic, disruptive change, but only if public policy allows it.

The Democratic Party’s latest flavor of the week, Pete Buttigieg,…

The bitter truth about most public policies being sold by the political class is that they give them more power to control our lives. If you favor some of these policies, be honest with the rest of us about what you mean, so that we can make more clear-headed judgments about the kind of society we want to live in.

When you no longer need to own a car, there is a huge convenience gain. Not only that, but resources become better utilized as owned automobiles no longer are wastefully parked in garages for long stretches, and consumers don't have to tie up their capital in something as banal as personal transportation.

Big Company capitalists lobby government for tax breaks, subsidies and protectionist policies rather than supporting competitive markets and a level economic playing field. They don’t defend the free-market system from which they have so richly benefited.

People like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may be as innocent and as sincere as they claim to be, but their statist schemes are going to fall afoul of economic realities.

The investment into the “tools of production” not only has a longer and more sustainable effect on the livelihood of people, but it actually meets the conditions of charity in a much more profound way.