Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away.
Imagine you are a deer. You have essentially only four things to do during the day: sleep, eat, avoid being eaten and socialise (by which I mean mark a territory, pursue a member of the opposite sex,...
Firms are temporary aggregations of people to help them do their producing in such a way as to help others do their consuming.
These days, the cancer cells often need another mutation to thrive: one that will outwit the chemotherapy or radiotherapy to which the cancer is subjected. Somewhere in the body, one of the cancer cel...
The elite gets things wrong, says Douglas Carswell in The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy, ‘because they endlessly seek to govern by design a world that is best organized spontaneously fro...
Uma das coisas mais fascinantes da raça humana é não haver duas pessoas iguais. (...) No comportamento, tal como na aparência, cada ser humano é único.
Economists are quick to speak of ‘market failure’, and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from ‘government failure’.
The government monopoly of money leads not just to the suppression of innovation and experiment, not just to inflation and debasement, not just to financial crises, but to inequality too. As Dominic F...
Far more than we like to admit, the world is to a remarkable extent a self-organising, self-changing place.
It was these Prussian schools that introduced many of the features we now take for granted. There was teaching by year group rather than by ability, which made sense if the aim was to produce military...
It is just possible that the predators and parasites will actually win altogether, or rather that ambitious ideological busybodies will succeed in shutting down the catallaxy and crashing the world ba...
Events are shaped by history rather than vice versa.
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term ‘meme’ for a unit of cultural imitation.
Free-market commerce is the only system of human organisation yet devised where ordinary people are in charge – unlike feudalism, communism, fascism, slavery and socialism.
The genome is littered, one might almost say clogged, with the equivalent of computer viruses, selfish, parasitic stretches of letters which exist for the pure and simple reason that they are good at...
The police have come to resemble an occupying army who see the citizenry as the enemy.
The economist John Bell Condliffe, saw what was happening, and warned presciently in 1938: ‘We face a new and more formidable superstition than the world has ever known: the myth of the nation-state,...
Human beings innovate by combining and recombining ideas, and the larger and denser the network, the more innovation occurs. Once again, notice that this is not policy.
These were people collaborating because they wanted to, not because they were paid to, and with little or no intellectual property in their ideas.
The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expan...
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