He was like modern atheists in arguing that the soul dies, there is no afterlife, all organised religions are superstitious delusions and invariably cruel, and angels, demons or ghosts do not exist. I...
Friedrich Hayek advanced the view that the common law contributed to greater economic welfare because it was less interventionist, less under the tutelage of the state, and was better able to respond...
For barter to work, two individuals do not need to offer things of equal value. Trade is often unequal, but still benefits both sides.
Countries where commerce thrives have far less violence than countries where it is suppressed. Does
China today has the economy of a twenty-first-century economic superpower with a political regime little changed since the 1950s. Is this slow evolution in political institutions down to the concentra...
California was especially enthusiastic about eugenics. By 1933 it had forcibly sterilised more people than all other states combined. So when the Third International Congress of Eugenics gathered at t...
Before Medicaid and Medicare existed, writes the American politician and former doctor Ron Paul, ‘every physician understood that he or she had a responsibility towards the less fortunate, and free me...
At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.
As a broad generalisation, the more people trust each other in a society, the more prosperous that society is, and trust growth seems to precede income growth.
American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and incorruptible saviour will emerge from the New Hampshire primary every four years, and proceed to...
A própria palavra sedução implica mentira e manipulação.
A month after the Watson-Crick structure was published, Britain crowned a new queen and a British expedition conquered Mount Everest on the same day. Apart from a small piece in the News Chronicle, th...
A corollary of this perspective is that there is no such thing as a perfect market, an equilibrium or an end state.
A Californian firm called Morning Star Tomatoes has been experimenting with ‘self-management’ for two decades. The result is that Morning Star is the largest processor of tomatoes in the world, handli...
The diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order. This is also a hallmark of civilisation.
If sympathy allows you to please yourself by pleasing others, are you being selfish or altruistic?
What was the secret that the serpent told Eve? That she could eat a certain fruit? Pah. That was a euphemism. The fruit was carnal knowledge, and everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Milton knew it. How d...
What is miraculous is that in modern society you can trust and be trusted by a shopkeeper you do not know.
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth that still fills me with astonishment. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
We are perforce in some sense constrained, goaded, or at least affected by the accumulated impact of selective decisions made over thousands of generations.