Topic: Art and Culture

Art and Culture, Capitalism, Economic History

The Beginning of the Modern World: It Was Always the Dutch

– January 14, 2024

“The Dutch Republic was a common destination for a brain-drain of innovators from elsewhere: merchants from the south, bakers from Germany, Portuguese and Spanish Jews.” ~Joakim Book

Art and Culture, Economic Growth, Media

Tucker Carlson’s Dollar Store Takedown

– January 13, 2024

“The best way to help those with lesser means is to provide them with more options. Dollar stores don’t create low-income households, they serve them.” ~Kimberlee Josephson

Art and Culture, Books, Entrepreneurship

Jimmy Buffett and the Bourgeois Virtues

– January 3, 2024

“I often find myself lost in the cosmos, as a professor who actually wants to teach, while the thundering herds of unprepared students and compliant administrators have given up on education.” ~Nikolai G. Wenzel

Art and Culture, Technology, Unemployment

ChatGPT is a Calculator; Deal with It

– January 1, 2024

“For many routine tasks—and, honestly, most writing is routine, not creative—it is faster and actually better to have the AI create the text, at least for the first draft.” ~Michael Munger

Art and Culture, Economic Theory, Free Trade

On Exceptions to the Rule of a Policy of Free Trade

– December 28, 2023

“Justification of a policy of free trade does not rest on the claim that free trade in each and every case yields ‘optimal’ results, or a stream of results as excellent as those that would be achieved by protectionist policies.” ~Donald J. Boudreaux

Art and Culture, Capitalism, Economic Education, History

This Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore: Maybe You Don’t Need a Can Opener

– December 26, 2023

“Pull tabs and plastic bottles are among the innumerable wonders free people exercising free minds in free markets bring to us every day in exchange for progressively fewer fruits of our labors.” ~Art Carden

Art and Culture, Economic History, Property Rights, Socialism

The Failure of the Pilgrims’ First Christmas

– December 25, 2023

“Believing that human nature is flawed and selfish, the colony leadership should have known that any system based on voluntary goodness was bound to fail.” ~Will Sellers

Art and Culture, Books, Classical Liberalism, Economic Education

“Strange, Isn’t It?” Adam Smith and the Angel Clarence

– December 24, 2023

“Adam Smith showed my students that they are constantly influenced for the better by the work of countless thousands of others whom they will never know.” ~Jeff Ziegler

Art and Culture, Economic Education, Free Trade

Music Has No Economic Value

– December 22, 2023

“With limited world demand for music, the economic value of that creation, like oxygen, falls to zero. The same isn’t true for the earphones I’m using, since they can’t also be used by anybody else.” ~Joakim Book

Art and Culture, Policy, War and Peace

After Veterans Day

– December 6, 2023

“One would be hard-pressed to defend a military action in recent decades that has had a demonstrably immediate connection to protecting our way of life.” ~Paul Schwennesen

Art and Culture, Economic History, Fiscal Policy, Property Rights

What Might Have Been

– December 3, 2023

“Wasteful uses of resources necessarily result in some economic opportunities that are possible being rendered impossible. What were these foregone opportunities?” ~Donald J. Boudreaux

Art and Culture, Economic History, Entrepreneurship

Frank Capra’s Timeless Vision of American Exceptionalism

– December 2, 2023

“Each film contains a large dose of middle-American values magnified time and again against the traps and situations of a complicated impregnable bureaucratic world. And in each case, the little guy wins.” ~Will Sellers