A hostile force is trying to take over Boston, and people who agree on little else have united to keep it out. The force is the US Olympic Committee, which wants to occupy the city in 2024. The Olympics is the unquestioned world leader in sports cronyism. Compliant politicians help it shove people aside, allocate […]
“I’m tired of hearing that ‘liberty’ will take care of it!” My young friend was explaining to me why she’s become less enthusiastic about libertarianism than she was a few years ago. I suspect she speaks for many smart young people who are just learning about libertarianism and getting a lot of bumper sticker ideas. […]
Great movements are marked by the dedication and accomplishments of steadfast individuals who make the most of every moment, every opportunity, and every available resource. When those great men and women pass from the scene, they leave behind untold numbers of friends and followers who derive comfort from their memory and inspiration from their deeds. […]
Well, they didn’t quite put it that way — the New York Times‘ headline read “New York panel recommends $15 minimum wage for fast-food workers” — but it amounts to the same thing. A panel appointed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo recommended on Wednesday that the minimum wage be raised for employees of fast food chain restaurants throughout […]
Paul Krugman, “Killing the European Project”, NY Times, July 12, 2015: The European project — a project I have always praised and supported — has just been dealt a terrible, perhaps fatal blow. And whatever you think of Syriza, or Greece, it wasn’t the Greeks who did it. Paul Krugman has always praised and supported the […]
Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland and Democratic presidential candidate, is no Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have made more than $100 million from speeches, much of it from companies and governments who just might like to have a friend in the White House or the State Department. But consider these paragraphs deep in a Washington […]
Why does federal spending matter? There are many reasons, but perhaps the most fundamental is that free markets allocate resources better than governments because markets rely on price instead of politics. Many industries show this observation to be true, but the emerging field of “green banks” offers perhaps one of the clearest recent examples. A […]
One of the more curious developments in the last couple of years has been left-wing nostalgia for the economy of the 1950s. Don’t political progressives usually portray themselves as being on “the right side of history” — representing, as the term suggests, the march of “progress”? Not when it comes to the economy. Paul Krugman […]
Look upon this meme, ye capitalists, and weep. Socialists are people who either 1) are badly misinformed about social scientific matters, or 2) make a common philosophical mistake that I’ve dubbed the “Cohen Fallacy,” in honor of G.A. Cohen. Regarding 1: Here is a ranking of all countries by how capitalist they are as of 2011. Where […]
In an otherwise excellent post responding to Noah Smith about economic growth, my Hoover colleague and friend John Cochrane makes a mistake in the history of economic thought. John writes: They do not call us the “dismal science” because we think the current world is close to the best of all possible ones, and all there is […]
In May 2014, CNN aired footage of a Ukrainian helicopter being shot [down] by pro-Russian militants. Taken with a cell phone camera and posted on social media, the video showed compelling evidence of the scale and technological sophistication of the Ukrainian conflict. The video was also fake — it was actually over a year old, […]
Boston mayor Martin Walsh gives Donald Trump the Chick-Fil-A rush* over his immigration opinions. Via the Boston Herald: If Donald Trump ever wants to build a hotel in Boston, he’ll need to apologize for his comments about Mexican immigrants first, the Hub’s mayor said. “I just don’t agree with him at all,” Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh told […]
The Institute for Justice reports on the strange, tragic case of Ken Quran: Khalid “Ken” Quran moved to America in 1997, leaving behind a life as a fireman in a town ten miles north of Jerusalem, near Ramallah. Ken now lives in Greenville, N.C., with his wife, Dina, and their four kids. Shortly after moving […]
Does the government need a search warrant to know where you’ve been? Not if your cell phone provider knows. If you don’t like how that sounds, there may be ways to change it. Take the case of Quartavious Davis, a Florida man convicted of robbing at gunpoint a pizzeria, a gas station, a drugstore, an […]
Opinions of Anne Hutchinson have, shall we say, covered the waterfront. In his masterful tome, Conceived in Liberty, 20th-century economist and libertarian historian Murray Rothbard cast her as a staunch individualist and the greatest threat to the “despotic Puritanical theocracy of Massachusetts Bay.” John Winthrop, the 2nd, 6th, 9th, and 12th governor of the Massachusetts […]