It’s those who do not have the power to hire and fire who are left with the work of figuring out what actually did go wrong
If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other...
Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at.
Defenders of capitalism generally make three broad historical claims: first, that it has fostered rapid scientific and technological development; second, that however much it may throw enormous wealth...
As the great classicist Moses Finley often liked to say, in the ancient world, all revolutionary movements had a single program: Cancel the debts and redistribute the land.
Правительства требуют уплаты налогов, потому что хотят наложить руку на деньги людей. Но если Смит был прав и золото и серебро стали деньгами благодаря естественному функционированию рынка, который ни...
Similar declarations are to be found again and again, in Sumerian and later Babylonian and Assyrian records, and always with the same theme: the restoration of justice and equity, the protection of wi...
One of the perennial complaints of the progressive left is that so many working-class Americans vote against their own economic interests—actively supporting Republican candidates who promise to slash...
Olaudah Equiano, born sometime around 1745 in a rural community somewhere within the confines of the Kingdom of Benin. Kidnapped from his home at the age of eleven, Equiano was eventually sold to Brit...
Max Weber famously pointed out that a sovereign state's institutional representatives maintain a monopoly on the right of violence within the state's territory. Normally, this violence can only be exe...
If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, Hand me the wrench, his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say, And what do I get for it?—even if they are working for Exxon-Mobil, Burger King, or Gol...
I always wonder how banks manage to go bankrupt at all considering they can just make up the money, and especially, what is stopping them from lending money to themselves.
Freedom has to be in tension with something, or it’s just randomness.
For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong. — H. L. Mencken (slightly rephrased)
For all its celebration of markets and individual initiative, this alliance of government and finance often produces results that bear a striking resemblance to the worst excesses of bureaucratization...
Credit Theorists insisted that money is not a commodity but an accounting tool. In other words, it is not a thing at all. For a Credit Theorist can no more touch a dollar or a deutschmark than you can...
The value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one’s trust in other human beings.
One could certainly make the argument that there’s a deep structural affinity between wasteful extravagance and bullshit...
It may be true that, if I could con- vince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the...
If one accepts Jean Piaget’s famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives (or possible perspectives) one can see, here, precisely how bureaucrati...