What Can and Cannot Be Planned
No one created that muddy track; it is the result of individuals going where they want to go. But if enough people walk there, it wears out the grass and makes the ground hard and packed down. The “path” emerges, although no one planned it.
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Anti-Market Atavism Explained
Moral norms that served small bands of humans well 10,000 years ago — share, cooperate, punish anyone who violates the rules — are no longer very good at helping people navigate commercial society. Ask someone about price-gouging laws, or kidney sales, or generally talk about the role of price as an indispensable signal of scarcity. Most people will get upset.
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Thanks to Capitalism, You Can Now Sleep Sitting Up
This pillow is not only a tribute to good engineering and good sense; it is a credit to a commercial system that enables and rewards innovation in service of the better life.
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Online Taxes Could Suffocate Small Retailers
State and local governments don’t need any more of our money to feed their budgets through taxes, whether they’re taken from online sales or not. We should be free to drop whatever we want into our virtual (or real) shopping carts in peace without government sweeping in to get a cut.
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Taylor Swift: Heroine for Property Rights
Swift has used her celebrity and art to stand up to bullies, whether they be corporations or colleagues in the music industry. She’s also singing her way to the bank.
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Anne of Green Gables Shows that Crypto Scams Are Nothing New
That an asset or innovation is subject to scamery, pushed by grifters, invested in by the deluded and avaricious, does not mean it is not a good idea. You can observe the fallacy with any new discovery that has ever appeared in the history of humankind.
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Directionalism vs. Destinationism
We can often make progress by pressing for improvement, rather than holding out for perfection. Sometimes, just the right kind of nothing is good enough.
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How Technology Bolsters Your Right to Work, Choose, and Earn
The information economy has liberated those who do the work from servile dependency on any single capital-controlling employer. We didn’t need Karl Marx to invent a new political order to do that; we just needed a better software infrastructure.
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Socialism, Like Dracula, Rises Again From the Grave
How very appealing was the socialist idea in the late 19th and early (pre-WWI) 20th centuries! All the burdens of life and everyday work, all the seemingly unjust inequalities of material wealth observable in society, and all the uncertainties of health care and old age would be lifted from the weary shoulders of the common man with the arrival of socialism.
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How Countries Can Avoid the Middle-Income Trap
To get out of the middle-income trap, the country must change from the imitative economy to an innovative economy. Instead of a top-down transformation, the economy needs to blossom from below.
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Predatory Pricing: More Theory Than Reality
All governments and all courts everywhere would, if they were sincerely committed to keeping markets as competitive as possible, announce loudly and unconditionally that never again will they take accusations of predatory pricing seriously.
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When “Democracy” Becomes a Threat to Liberty
Friends of freedom, including many of those who strongly believed in and fought for representative and democratically elected government in the 18th and 19th centuries, often expressed fearful concerns that “democracy” could, itself, become a threat to the liberty of many of the very people that democratic government was supposed to protect from political abuse.
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