Entries by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Young Montana Entrepreneur Is Being Legally Barred from Hauling Trash Because Established Players Don’t Want the Competition

If it sounds crazy that established players get a say on who is allowed to compete with them, well, it should. When Parker Noland launched his trash-hauling business at age 20 in the summer of 2021, he was excited about the opportunities that lay before him. After taking out a loan from a local bank, […]

Six Ways Socialism is Anti-Social

If it’s voluntary, it’s not socialism. It’s that simple. Here’s a question for a PhD dissertation: How did something so radically anti-social ever get the name, social-ism? I leave that vexing matter to whoever wants to write it up. Meantime, I can assist the project by offering some of the reasons why socialism is a self-evidently anti-social contrivance. First, […]

The Three Traits of Tyranny

According to John Locke and the American Founders The American founders who drafted and signed the Declaration of Independence grounded their case for separating from Great Britain on a philosophy of government derived from the writings of John Locke: especially from Lockean notions of legitimate government vs. illegitimate government, i.e. tyranny. In his Two Treatises of […]

Don’t Confuse Trusting the Experts with Knowing the Facts

If someone were to ask you how you know Australia exists, what would you say? If you haven’t been there yourself, it can be a surprisingly difficult question to answer. You might point to your grade school geography teacher who first told you about the country. “I know it exists because my teacher told me […]

Did Maskless Fans at the World Cup Trigger the Mass Demonstrations in China?

The Covid state is a powerful example of why authoritarian regimes can’t tolerate free speech. Protests erupted across China in recent days as demonstrators have taken to the streets in what is being described as the largest mass protest in the nation since Tiananmen Square. From Shanghai to Beijing to college universities across the country, Chinese demonstrators […]

Why Sam Bankman-Fried Sounded so Much Like a Rand Villain

Sam Bankman-Fried, unlike James Taggart, is not an idiot. He knew his altruism was phony. The financial collapse of the crypto exchange FTX was brutal and swift. Almost overnight, its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried saw his $16 billion fortune wiped out. SBF, as he’s popularly known, managed to fool almost the entire world—though not quite everyone. In […]

Governments Are Using Drones to Spy on Americans. Here’s How People Are Fighting Back

Drone technology is making it easier than ever for governments to stick their nose where it doesn’t belong. Americans have long been concerned about government surveillance, and rightly so. Being watched by the government is incredibly disconcerting, especially when government agents are probing into your private life. The rise of drone technology has not helped […]

What Happens When You Google ‘Capitalism Fights Racism’

We are led to believe that the free market is the force responsible for so much of the injustice, racism, and inequality seen in the modern world. But is this true? If you look up “capitalism fights racism” in Google, the top search results will show articles like: “Is Capitalism Racist,” “Capitalism without Racism: Science […]

5 Counterintuitive Things I Learned Reading Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’

Rand makes some radical claims in the book, but when you think about it, they make a lot of sense. I recently picked up Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead, and I must say I quite enjoyed it. For those who haven’t read it, The Fountainhead is a story about a young architect named Howard Roark. Roark […]

Kevin O’Leary on Inflation: You Printed $7 Trillion in 30 Months. What Did you Think Would Happen?

Americans are facing 40-year high inflation and there’s been no shortage of discussion on the topic. It’s the number one issue on the mind of Americans heading into midterms, and every day on TV and in newspapers pundits are debating how long it will last and deciding who is to blame. What’s most astonishing amid the flurry […]

Who Authorized the Department of Homeland Security to Police Online Speech? Not Congress

Newly published documents obtained by the Intercept show the US government is actively shaping online discourse and policing speech. This invites a question: who gave them this authority? When George W. Bush signed the Homeland Security Act in 2002, the goal was to improve national security by strengthening government at various levels and helping them identify […]

The States With the Best [and Worst] Business Tax Climate

Here’s the map showing how states rank. The best states are blue and the worst states are dark grey—VIEW MAP Because I dedicated last week to European fiscal policy, I didn’t get a chance to write about the Tax Foundation’s latest version of the State Business Tax Climate Index, which was released October 25. Last year, the top-4 states […]

Why the Rise of Intersectionality in Medicine Will Have Serious Consequences

School standards have fallen for the sake of political correctness over effective and dependable education. That is dangerous. In early October, my alma mater made headlines after it decided to fire chemistry professor Dr. Maitland Jones Jr. after 82 of his students signed a petition noting that his organic chemistry class was “too hard.” The students accused […]

When Equality Becomes Evil

Equality before the law is an indisputably good thing. Using force to make people equal is an entirely different story. Memorize the following line, teach it to your children, and shout it from the rooftops every chance you get. It’s one of the most important truths you’ll ever learn or teach: Free people are not equal, […]