The Empire State as a whole (with wide swaths outside the Big Apple being notable exceptions) is a bastion of big, activist and ambitious government. The state is ranked dead last among the 50 for economic freedom as measured by the Mercatus Center. New York City is now run by a mayor who thinks that […]
Ayn Rand died on this day [March 6th], 32 years ago. Today, young Indians are snapping up her books at a surprising rate. It’s an apparent contradiction. Howard Roark, The Fountainhead’s main character, is a man with strong principles. But he’s also arrogant. Here in India, humility is considered the fundamental moral virtue. He might have […]
The new mayor of New York wants to make city streets safer. According to The New York Times: Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday unveiled a sweeping set of proposals aimed at improving street safety in New York City, pledging considerable police resources and even precious political capital in Albany to a most ambitious goal: eliminating […]
The trouble with a vision for society is the body count. The more specific the outcome you want to impose, the more dissent you’ll stir up. So you’re going to have to find a lot of places for all the bodies, or give up your grip on power. There’s a silver lining for the State, […]
When it comes to public discourse, inequality is immensely fashionable. Along with its featured position at this year’s Davos conference, it received top billing in President Obama’s recent State of the Union address. But most of this talk lacks merit. Some inequality is in fact necessary; it provides the incentives for creativity and innovation. In […]
“One night we asked people to blink their lights if they believed in freedom for Poland. We went to the window, and for hours, all of Warsaw was blinking.” Over the last 25 years, leaders in the free market movement have stressed the need for sound public-policy research and basic economic education. Though important, […]
In 1999 we attended the Rotary International conference in Singapore and sat on a bus next to a fellow Rotarian, a physician from Ukraine. Rotary had only established its first Ukrainian club a few years earlier and my seat neighbor introduced himself to us. A conversation and friendship ensued, and “Oleg” invited us to visit […]
Editors’ note: A few months back, we interviewed a full-time BTC trader, who still wishes to remain anonymous. In the wake of Mt. Gox’s collapse, we reached out for comment. Here’s what he had to say: I did lose some BTC on the collapse, enough to sting, but it’s something of a small price if it means […]
Obamacare victimizes Americans, but politics means never having to say you’re sorry. Remember the glowing, utopian talk about the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” back in 2009–10? We heard constantly that it was the solution to a national crisis, carefully contrived to guarantee high-quality insurance for virtually everyone without making anyone worse off. And so the […]
Hardly anyone reads Longfellow anymore, but maybe we should. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Evangeline. 1847. 64 pages. Nobody reads Longfellow anymore, except perhaps students at Bowdoin College, where Longfellow was a student and later a librarian and professor. But Longfellow’s poetry used to be read and recited everywhere. Memorizing it was a common exercise for school children. And […]
Do you like having options when you look for a new bank, dry cleaner, or veterinarian? Of course you do. You want to find the service that will best satisfy your particular demands, after all, and you know that when banks, cleaners, and vets have to compete they have a powerful incentive to make you […]
Vouchers are back in vogue, but higher ed offers us lessons about a K–12 tuition spiral. Twenty-five years ago, education secretary Bill Bennett advanced the idea that government student aid was largely to blame for the steady increases in college tuition. Since then, higher education reformers have been sounding the alarm about the tuition spiral. […]
When you read that Social Security lifts 50 percent of seniors out of poverty, keep in mind that it was largely the cost of Social Security that put them there. It’s the perfect example of government incompetence creating higher costs and misguided incentives—and delivering exactly the opposite of what it promised. The contradiction stems from […]
How do new technologies become part of life experience? They don’t drop from heaven, completed and ready to use. They enter into our world in marginal steps through real-time markets. These markets are full of play, experimentation, success and failure, price discovery, and technological fits and starts. Without this process, technology would remain forever in […]