The publication of Thomas Piketty’s bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century has led to widespread attention on the rising gap between rich and poor, and to populist calls for government to redistribute income and wealth. Purveyors of that rhetoric, however, overlook the reality that when the state plays a major role in leveling differences in […]
Paganism as a distinct and separate religion may perhaps be said to have died, although, driven out of the cities, it found refuge in the countryside, where it lingered long — and whence, indeed, its very name is derived. In a very real sense, however, it never died at all. It was only transformed and […]
Cyberhawks have seized upon this year’s massive hack of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to shove a wolfish surveillance bill in a sheepish cybersecurity bill’s clothing down America’s throat. But the “Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015” (CISA) would have done nothing to stop the hack that exposed as many as 14 million federal employees’ personnel […]
Today, our friends at the Institute for Justice launched a new challenge to yet another instance of egregious civil asset forfeiture abuse. Charles Clarke is a 24-year-old college student who found out the hard way that government officials can confiscate property on the mere suspicion that it has a “substantial connection” to a crime or is the […]
Some people can smell a rat a mile away. Others don’t notice even when the odor wafts right under their noses. Olfactory proficiency by itself doesn’t make you a hero. But if you’re among the first to pick up the scent and warn others, and then you put your political future on the line to […]
Last winter, I was getting ready to put insulating plastic on all of my windows to keep the cold out. I quizzed my Facebook friends to see if they could use the economic way of thinking to predict which room’s windows I would insulate first. They had some good suggestions. Maybe the coldest room? Maybe […]
The California Labor Commission, with its expansive power to categorize and codify what it is that workers do, has dealt a terrible blow to Uber, the disruptive ride-sharing service. In one administrative edict, it has managed to do what hundreds of local governments haven’t. Every rapacious municipal taxi monopoly in the state has to be […]
Pope Francis’s new encyclical on the environment (Laudato Sii) warns of the coming environmental catastrophe (“unprecedented destruction of ecosystems, with serious consequences for all of us”). It’s the latest entry in a long literary tradition of environmental doomsday warnings. In contrast, Matt Ridley, bestselling author of Genome, The Agile Gene, and The Rational Optimist, who also received the 2012 […]
The Obama administration’s Food and Drug Administration today announced a near-ban, in the making since 2013, on the use of partially hydrogenated vegetable fats (“trans fats”) in American food manufacturing. Specifically, the FDA is knocking trans fats off the Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) list. This is a big deal and here are some reasons why: 1. It’s frank paternalism. […]
I was in an elevator and heard a conversation between a young worker in information technology and an old timer involved in heavy industry. They were talking professions. The young man told the old man that he was in digital marketing. You could feel the sense of incredulity in the small space, and (though he […]
AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire is a brilliant achievement. The show is a vibrant look at the emerging personal computer industry in the early 1980s. But more than that, the show is about capitalism, creative destruction, and innovation. While we all know the PC industry changed the world, the visionaries and creators who brought us […]
In political science terms medieval Iceland has been called an “anarchy,” but it is more realistic to describe it as a very peer-to-peer kind of government. — Nick Szabo Many observers think Nick Szabo is the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin. Szabo, you see, is a coding wizard who had already created an earlier […]
Heather McDonald’s Wall Street Journal op-ed “The New Nationwide Crime Wave” has exploded into the debate over police misconduct and criminal justice reform like a flash-bang grenade. It’s been discussed on numerous talk radio and cable news shows, and it’s been shared nearly 40,000 times on social media. It’s a story engineered to go viral: It has a […]
It must have been pretty rotten to sleep in, say, the 12th century Europe. Your floor was dirt. Your mattress was made from hay or bean husks. The biggest drag of all must have been the bed bug problem. It’s not so fabulous to lie there asleep while thousands of ghastly critters gnaw on your flesh. […]
People are becoming more conscious about animal welfare. The livestock, they say, shouldn’t be confined to factory farms — five by five — in such horrible conditions. These beings should be given more freedom to roam and to develop in a more natural way. They’re treated as mere chattel for the assembly line. It’s inhumane […]