Editor’s Pick. Written by Moisés Naím. Power is shifting—from large, stable armies to loose bands of insurgents, from corporate leviathans to nimble start-ups, from presidential palaces to public squares. It has become harder to wield power and easier to lose it, and the world is becoming less predictable as a result. As people become more…
Category: Free Markets
Why Low Skilled Immigrants are Good for the Economy
Editor’s Pick. Video by ReasonTV.
Why Do We Exchange Things?
Editor’s Pick. Video by LearnLiberty.org.
Intellectual Property and the Great “Debate”
Editor’s Pick. Written by Matthew Alexander. I come to the battlefield after the fires have extinguished and the embers cooled, but having fully intended to write something on the subject when it was hot, I feel the central topic is timeless and the particular affair in question momentous enough to warrant some comments, even if…
Is Pot too Potent to Legalize?
Editor’s Pick. Written by Mark Thornton. During alcohol prohibition (1920-1933), alcohol consumption went from a beer, wine, and whiskey market to one of rotgut whiskey with little wine or beer available. The rotgut whiskey could be more than twice as potent of the normal whiskey that was produced both before and after prohibition. The product…
Bitcoin: Roller Coaster of Love
Editor’s Pick. Written by Thomas L. Knapp. It’s up, it’s down. It’s the future of commerce one day, just another Internet bubble the next. It’s the end of government-controlled currency and banking … but wait, the US government’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has something to say about that. It’s Bitcoin, and you’ve almost certainly been…
Free Health Care for the Needy: A Model Deserving of Support
Editor’s Pick. An interview by the Libertas Institute. Libertas Institute: Please tell us who you are and what you do. DeAnne Staheli: My name is DeAnne Staheli and I’m the director of the Doctors’ Volunteer Clinic of St. George. LI: How did your clinic get started? DS: In 1999, Dr. Doxey was president of the…
Just Market Exchanges
Editor’s Pick. Written by Neera Badhwar. Aristotle defines a voluntary act as one that has its cause in the agent rather than an external force, and that is done in knowledge of the relevant particulars. This is entirely commonsensical. Everyone would agree that in being blown away by the twister, Dorothy leaves Kansas involuntarily, and…
Economics, Not Engineering
Editor’s Pick. Written by Sandy Ikeda. Let’s say we lived in the kind of world in which the government could eliminate some well-recognized social problem, say violent crime, by simply passing a law. Although you may like that particular outcome, the question is, would you want to live in such a world? While some might…
The Rich – Poor Gap
Editor’s Pick. Written by Slappy Jones II. Every now and then I come across an article or hear someone on the radio talking about the gap between the rich and the poor getting larger. They’ll typically throw out a stat saying something like “The economy grew X amount, and the top 1% saw 90% of…