Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH-13), a 2020 presidential hopeful, said on CNN Wednesday that he’s “concerned” about the rise of socialism within the Democratic Party. “I’m concerned about it because if we are going to de-carbonize the American economy it’s not going to be some centralized bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. that’s…
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by Barry Brownstein Consider these numbers. The final season of Game of Thrones cost about $100 million to film. In 1300, the entire medieval English real GDP was only 40 million English pounds. Game of Thrones doesn’t hide the desperate poverty of common people living in a fantasy version…
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by Michael Munger Josh Billings famously diagnosed a problem with beliefs: “I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.” I am astonished at how many students, and for that matter adults, in the U.S. honestly believe that the U.S. should model itself…
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by Christopher Gage My old man tells me he left college in the 1970s and walked into a job for life. He tells me his first home cost twice the average salary. Then he tells me, without a soupçon of jest, “things were still pretty tough back then.” His…
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by Deion Kathawa More than two years into President Trump’s historic presidency, it behooves us to think more deeply about a persistent sticking point in the political life of the nation: Why do (most) right-wing intellectuals loathe him? This kind of nearly unified opposition cries out for explanation. After…
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by Barry Brownstein You don’t have to search far to read claims that capitalism is centered on greed and selfishness. For some, the assertion seems self-evident as they read, for example, stories of pharmaceutical companies dramatically increasing the price of important drugs. Those who hold a “capitalists are greedy” belief fail to…
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by Walter E. Williams A recent Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation survey found that 51 percent of American millennials would rather live in a socialist or communist country than in a capitalist country. Only 42 percent prefer the latter. Twenty-five percent of millennials who know who Vladimir Lenin was…
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by Burton Folsom We study history to learn from it. If we can discover what worked and what didn’t work, we can use this knowledge wisely to create a better future. Studying the triumph of American industry, for example, is important because it is the story of how the…
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by Rick Manning The bedrock of American commerce – and of the broader capitalist experiment – has always been competition. If you can build a better mousetrap, invent a longer-lasting light bulb or more efficiently churn out widgets (or in this case, clichés), odds are your endeavor will encounter success. It doesn’t…
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by Luis Pablo De La Horra Milton Friedman is probably the most important free-market thinker of the twentieth century. His ideas in defense of capitalism and economic freedom had an enormous influence on the shift towards free-market policies that took place from the 1970s onwards. Countries like the UK, China,…
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