Economics

Eric Metaxas interviews polymathic genius George Gilder. Gilder is an American investor, author, economist, and co-founder of the Discovery Institute. In this interview we discuss many things including his latest book: Life After Capitalism: The Meaning of Wealth, the Future of the Economy, and the Time Theory of Money.

It was probably fifteen years ago that I was at lunch with Banknote Capital’s Jim Fitzgerald. We were finishing up when the conversation shifted to tax rates, at which point Fitzgerald dismissed the notion that lower rates stimulate more work.

To be clear, Fitzgerald was not saying that he opposed lower tax rates. He was and is very much for them. But he was expressing his disdain for the theory that lower rates cause people to work more. In his case, Fitzgerald would work a great deal precisely because there was joy in it.

Still, what he said at the time was jarring. It called into question so much that was accepted wisdom. Gradually it made lots of sense. Tax rates should be low simply because they should be low. After that, it’s perhaps unrealistic to suggest that Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and FedEx founder Fred Smith began to build their remarkable businesses only after consulting the tax code. Work for them was and is similarly joy.

The conversation with Fitzgerald, along with my own evolution on matters economic, came to mind while reading George Gilder’s essential new book, Life After Capitalism. Though Gilder penned what many view as the underlying philosophy of supply-side economics with the brilliant Wealth and Poverty in 1981, in his spectacular 2013 book Knowledge and Power Gilder began to question the “incentive” economics that at least on the surface informs supply-side.

Author of national bestseller Life After Google and generation-defining Wealth and Poverty, venture capitalist, futurist, and pioneering thinker extraordinaire George Gilder pinpoints how the clash of creativity with power at the heart of economic systems leads to global cognitive dissonance and argues that the creation of the novel taps capitalism’s infinite promise and is humanity’s only path of escape from stagnation and tyranny. Gilder Read More ›

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