An Essential Resource for Enlightened Minds Since 1972
The Department of Energy, which is the Supreme Court of your home appliances, thinks you might be wasting precious energy. And the bureaucrats have a plan for doing something about it. They want to take away the clock on your microwave oven. You know, that’s the little digital display that we oddly depend on to… read more
Read More CommentThe Supreme Court will soon issue its decision in response to Obamacare litigation. It’s anyone’s guess how this will turn out, and that’s a tragedy. A plain reading of the Constitution gives no authority to the federal government to administer a vast enforcement apparatus that profoundly affects everyone’s life and economic well being of the… read more
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Do you notice a pattern when dealing with any aspect of the government at nearly any level? We all have. There is a certain cast of mind at work here. This is my attempt to frame it up and identify its main features. Experience shows that if something is going to go really wrong, predictably… read more
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Some writings have turned the world upside down. They toppled tyrannies. They sparked revolutions and ennobled humanity. The Magna Carta. Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” Thomas Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence.” Great scholarship can do the same. In the 20th century, there was Ludwig von Mises’s “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.” This 1920 essay astonished the… read more
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I was just reading about how the median wage is lower today than it was a decade ago. Ouch. The cause, says this article, is inflation. Inflation? That’s interesting. Hardly anyone talks about that anymore. I can’t remember the last time I read a mainstream article that so much as mentioned it as a problem.… read more
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Digital technology is reinventing our whole world, in service of you and me. It’s free enterprise on steroids. It’s bypassing the gatekeepers and empowering each of us to invent our own civilization for ourselves, according to our own specifications. The promise of the future is nothing short of spectacular — provided that those who lack… read more
Read More CommentIt’s fashionable to put down commercial culture, but, when you think about it, this makes no sense. Commerce is the driving force of human progress, in more ways that we often realize. Americans in the 19th century knew this and celebrated this. Our commercial culture was a source of pride and the envy of the… read more
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Sorry, but I dreaded my visit to the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich. It had to be done, if only to see what thoughts it would inspire. As it turns out, I’m happy this institution exists. It is a real tribute to a great American who would have been… read more
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Growing up in the Cold War, we tended to look at Russia as a nightmare slave society that was utterly and completely foreign to anything Americans knew or could possibly know absent some kind of invasion. If I were to summarize the propaganda message of the time it would be this: We are free, they… read more
Read More Comment“The private economy is doing fine.” Those were the words of President Obama that unleashed a torrent of political hysteria. The Romney campaign immediately blasted him for suggesting that things are just hunky-dory, and he was right to do so, given the terrible slog we’ve been through and given that there seems to be no… read more
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Shanghai’s leading code slinger, David Veksler, who is also a good friend and long-time collaborator on all things digital, has come up with something wonderfully subversive. It is an encrypted messaging service that takes a giant step toward making cryptography available to the rest of us. It is called cryptabyte.com. It is the first, easy-to-use,… read more
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Many people these days openly express regret about the digital age. I find their complaints vacuous: They say we are losing the art of human contact, but most of us have never been more in touch with actual humans They say we are losing sight of the highest pursuits, yet the digital age has brought… read more
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My link to my family past is a photograph taken in dusty, desolate West Texas, the one in which my grandmother on my father’s side is seated upfront in a child’s chair. She looks to be about 5 years old, which would date the image as 1920. Behind her are her mother and father, with… read more
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The financial pages and popular culture are often strangely aligned. For example, many young people today are consumed with the seeming emergence of a zombie apocalypse. Evidence seems to be everywhere. I dare not present any of the details. Too gross. Plus, as a grown-up, I’m a skeptic of the whole zombie apocalypse theory. We… read more
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I never tire of looking out the windows of airplanes. For all of human history until just about the day before yesterday, no living person saw the world like this. People could climb up to the top of mountains and see the valleys below. But to see that whole view looking straight down was the… read more
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Economic trends today are a litany of awful: high personal debt, stratospheric government debt, persistent trade deficits, declining living standards, government out of control, cycles of bubbles, zero return on savings, unemployment, and the ever-higher cost of living. Everyone complains about these all the time. They make it hard to live a normal life. They… read more
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There’s a national park close to my house that has a large lake and all the swimming accoutrements left over from the 1970s. It’s a nightmare for any “safety Nazi.” The water is very deep. A diving board is very high and slippery, even slightly broken. There is no lifeguard on duty. If you dive… read more
Read More Comment“I just joined the Club!” That’s the whole content of an email I received from a very old friend who is very special to me. He is speaking of the Laissez Faire Club, the startup digital literary city created by Laissez Faire Books. I credit this writer for (inadvertently) training me in an important aspect… read more
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Someone asked me the other day if I believe in conspiracies. Well, sure. Here’s one. It is called the political system. It is nothing if not a giant conspiracy to rob, trick and subjugate the population. People participate in the hope of making our lives better, or at least curbing the damage government does. Yet… read more
Read More CommentWhat’s great about POM Wonderful? Sure, this pomegranate juice tastes great. POM is one of the few drinks that seems to have the same scrunch-up-your-mouth effect that you get with a bold dry red wine. When I was a kid, it didn’t exist. Like everything wonderful in this world, it comes to us because of… read more
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The great recession continues in so many ways but online commerce is booming as never before, increasing in the last quarter of 2011 at the fastest rates in six years. Before you know it, the retail side alone will account for $300 billion in sales per year. We click and pay, and if it’s not… read more
Read More CommentYou might have noticed that lots of people are really down on the so-called 1%. It drives many people, especially politicians, absolutely bonkers that there are lots of people out there sitting on millions, billions. Populists imagine that these people do nothing but hoard and count and let out menacing laughs about the advantages they… read more
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The United States is home to a gigantic socialist sector, larger and with a greater reach than any in the world, and it is fed by tax dollars and managed entirely by the government. Strangely, the opponents of socialized medicine and socialized industry don’t complain about it. In fact, all throughout the 1980s and 1990s,… read more
Read More CommentDreamers and accountants — they say that both types of people are necessary for a great business. One without the other is a dead end. Together, the magic can happen. And the magic is certainly happening at the Laissez Faire Club, now celebrating what Doug Hill calls its one-month-iversary (I’m pretty sure that is a… read more
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Let’s say that Rajat Gupta, former director at Goldman Sachs on trial for insider trading, is toss in the slammer for passing on information four years ago. Let’s say that he really did receive — and then let slip — a tip that Goldman would soon be getting a nice cash infusion from Berkshire Hathaway,… read more
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Now that hysteria over my original Brazil column has died down, let me add some comments and reflections about it and what gave rise to the reactions. To review, I had written a piece praising the many glorious features of Brazil and especially the way in which civilization has managed to thrive by virtue of… read more
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The organization Campaign for Safe Cosmetics doesn’t just want you to be able to have new choices about the makeup or other products you buy. It wants the FDA to be able to ban and recall products. It will decide for you what is and isn’t safe. And it is prevailing against the industry itself,… read more
Read More CommentThe great debate between capitalism and socialism suffers from a lack of clarity about definitions. This is why when Walter Block lectured in Brazil this past week, he was very careful to distinguish between crony capitalism and authentic capitalism. And it’s why when I was interviewed, the question came up immediately: What precisely do you… read more
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My most surprising findings in Brazil, aside from the amazing fruits that I didn’t know existed because the U.S. government doesn’t think I need them, were the young American kids who have moved here to find economic opportunity. This I had not expected, but now fully understand. Brazil is a marvelous and massive country where… read more
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Time was tight and people were rushing to catch flights. This particular terminal in Miami was usually fast, everyone knew, but for some reason, the TSA was seriously understaffed. What do they care whether people spend 90 minutes waiting in the checkpoint? They have no stake in the profitability of the airlines and no real… read more
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