A call for more civil discourse
In his article on FEE, Steven Horowitz argues that a key to civil discourse is attempting to view the debate from the other side. It is all too easy to…
21st century Chinatown?
Those who remember the 1974 classic film Chinatown will find this story eerily familiar. (ReasonTV) The Antelope Valley is a vast patch of desert on the outskirts of Los Angeles…
The virtues of competition
Orson Welles as Harry Lime in the film adaptation of Graham Greene’s Third Man. Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy…
A theory about the poor’s aversion to welfare
(The Economist) Instead of opposing redistribution because people expect to make it to the top of the economic ladder, the authors of the new paper argue that people don’t like…
Are sovereign islands the new frontier?
(Details) [Peter] Thiel spends a lot of time thinking about frontiers. “Way more than is healthy,” he admits. Not just financial frontiers, though that’s his day job: He cofounded PayPal,…
Police and thieves in the street
by Junior Murvin Police and thieves in the street (oh yeah) Fighting the nation with their guns and ammunition Police and thieves in the street (oh yeah) Scaring the nation…
The plight of the middle class
Robert Reich connects the dots on the economy, in less than 2 minutes and 15 seconds. A number of questions arise, not the least important of which has to do…
Life and times in the rentership society
(Bloomberg) The U.S. homeownership rate has fallen below 60 percent when delinquent borrowers are excluded, a sign of the country’s move toward a “rentership society,” Morgan Stanley said in a…
The math behind economies of scale
(TED) Physicist Geoffrey West has found that simple, mathematical laws govern the properties of cities — that wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other aspects of a city can…
An ethical case for ‘Loser Pays’
In a recent article, Gozmodo reports of an independent artist that was charged with copyright infringement, and was forced to settle for tens of thousands of dollars, even though he…
Let’s diversify the states!
In a recent study, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University examined the laws and regulations that each of the 50 American states impose on their citizens and produced a…
New rules, new system?
In Bill Maher’s New Rules segment, the comedian/political maven shuffles through several new rules he has come up with that he suggests would solve some of our problems. Examples range…
Is Distributism the answer?
In John C. Médaille’s book, Toward a Truly Free Market, the argument is made that the modern system is a self-perpetuating cycle that can only lead to more regulation and…
Are we divided?
Reason.tv’s Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie joined The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel on CNN’s In the Arena with Eliot Spitzer to discuss how divided both Washington and Americans are by ideology today…
How to choose a winner
Thanks to another week of volatility in the markets, we are again face-to-face with the fact that there is absolutely no sensible reason for the movement of stock and derivatives…
Inventing a frontier
On his Cafe Hayek blog, esteemed economist Don Boudreaux has recently ignited a fascinating conversation on the concept of limited land, inspired by the FLOWidealism listserve. In it, the idea…
A government of Hottentots
(Washington Post) It was billed as President Obama’s big speech on reducing the federal budget deficit. But the Wednesday afternoon address sounded at times like the speech he did not…
Lessons from the Bushmen
One of the central themes of Juggernaut is that of the closed economy, where alternatives have been eliminated and a people are forced to make do with the social constructs…
The unrecognizable future
With a predicted population of 9 billion, food production and competition for resources could change the face of our planet. http://news.discovery.com/earth/earth-unrecognizable-2050-resources-110220.html While there can be no doubt that the future…