Government Central Planning Fails—Free People Create Order on Our Own

July 28th, 2023 3:25 PM

Politicians have big plans for us. President Joe Biden repeatedly says, “I have a plan for that.” “I alone can fix it,” shouted President Donald Trump. But most of life, and the best of life, happens when politicians butt out and let us make our own choices. Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou called that “spontaneous order.” Thousands of years later, economist F. A. Hayek added that order comes “…

Some Ideas To Think About

August 1st, 2018 2:15 PM
Poverty is no mystery, and it's easily avoidable. The poverty line that the Census Bureau used in 2016 for a single person was an income of $12,486 that year. For a two-person household, it was $16,072, and for a four-person household, it was $24,755. To beat those poverty thresholds is fairly simple. Here's the road map: Complete high school; get a job, any kind of a job; get married before…

Ignorance Versus Stupidity

November 8th, 2017 12:32 AM
One of the most challenging and important jobs for an economics professor is to teach students how little we know and can possibly know. My longtime friend and colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell says, "It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." Nobel laureate Friedrich August von Hayek admonished, "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little…

Ann Coulter Smacks Down Arrogant Eliot Spitzer: 'What Business Have Yo

June 12th, 2011 3:32 PM
CNN's Eliot Spitzer arrogantly lectured about the benefits of Keynesian economics Sunday while accusing fellow panelists on "Fareed Zakaria GPS" of not knowing what they were talking about because they weren't business owners. This led British historian Andrew Roberts to point out that President Obama's administration are mostly academics, and Ann Coulter to ask Spitzer, "What business have…