Progressivism can be viewed as socialism lite, paying homage to the great progress of capitalism while acknowledging some of the limitations of a free market. Social and economic theories develop, mature and evolve as they face the hard tests of…
Read MoreThe big prize at Freedom Fest was George Gilder, most famously noted for his Wealth and Poverty. His new book is The Scandal of Money. Gilder wrote of travelling to China with Milton Friedman and respectfully challenges many of Friedman’s…
Read MoreThere is something, evidently, in the human mind, even when carefully honed at Oxford or the Sorbonne, that hesitates to believe in capitalism: in the enriching mysteries of inequality, the inexhaustible mines of the division of labor, the multiplying miracles…
Read MoreA pot of honey attracts flies as well as bears. Bureaucrats, politicians, bishops, raiders, robbers, revolutionaries, short-sellers, managers, business writers, and missionaries all think they can invest money better than its owners. Owners are besieged on all sides by aspiring…
Read MoreAn economy can continue to grow only if its profits are joined with entrepreneurial knowledge. In general, wealth can increase only if the people who create it control it. Divorce the financial profits from the learning process and the economy…
Read MoreIn the United States today we are facing the usual calculus of impossibility, recited by the familiar aspirants to a master plan. It is said we must abandon economic freedom because our frontier is closed; because our biosphere is strained;…
Read MoreThe most obvious rule of social science is that people will abuse any free good. Regardless of what politicians promise to gullible voters, government services cannot ultimately escape the constraints of supply and demand. A price of “free” evokes unbounded…
Read MoreUnder capitalism, economic power flows not to the intellectual, who manipulates ideas and basks in their light, but to the man who gives himself to his ideas and tests them with his own wealth and work. It is these capitalists,…
Read MoreAs Steve Forbes stresses, the role of currencies is to serve as a standard of value, representing a measuring stick of the worth of goods and services. “Floating the currency is like floating the clock. Let’s say you floated the…
Read MoreSome implicitly accept the behavioral dream of “Skinner box” economics of stimulus and response, in which lower rates impart a stimulus of reward for more work and risk-taking, yielding more revenues for the government. A successful economy, however, is driven…
Read MoreThe key issue in economics is not aligning incentives with some putative [supposed] public good but aligning knowledge with power. Business investments bring both a financial and epistemic [knowledge] yield. Capitalism catalytically joins the two. Capitalist economies grow because they…
Read MoreThe problem of the United States comes not chiefly from its liabilities, serious though they are, but from the suffocating webs of government regulations and subsidies, pettifoggery (a quarrel about petty points) and litigation that is devaluing the the assets…
Read MoreGeorge Gilder writes Unleash the Mind in National Review. It is from his soon to be released update of his classic Wealth and Poverty. It is not the enlargement of incentives and rewards that generates growth and progress, profits and capital gains…
Read MoreThe war against the rich thus continues in the world’s wealthiest country. It is a campaign now led and inspired by the declining rich, to arouse the currently poor against the insurgently successful business classes. By their communicative skills and…
Read MoreEconomists ill-serve themselves by describing economics as being about the allocation of scarce resources. It is about the creation of resources. Capitalism is more an information system than a incentive system. The key issue in economics is aligning knowledge with…
Read MoreSocialism is an insurance policy bought by all the members of a national economy to shield them from risk. But the result is to shield them from knowledge of the real dangers and opportunities ubiquitous in any society. Rather than…
Read MoreThe United States must overcome the materialist fallacy: the illusion that resources and capital are essentially things, which can run out, rather than products of human will and imagination, which in freedom are inexhaustible. This fallacy is one of the…
Read MoreNatural history is a saga not of balance but of convulsive changes, wiping out whole species left and right, transforming continents, evulsing mountains, and flooding vast plains and valleys. There is no such thing as equilibrium, in ecology any more…
Read MoreIn economics, when demands is permitted to displace supply in the order of priorities, the result is a sluggish and uncreative economy, inflation, and a decline in productivity. Such disorders afflict both our politics and our economics today. The problem…
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