The Good Old Days Were Really Expensive
Book Review: George Gilder’s Brilliant ‘Life After Capitalism’
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.
Read More ›Gale Pooley’s New Book Superabundance Out Now
Former Federal Homelessness Czar Joins Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty as a Senior Fellow
Seattle – Robert Marbut, a renowned expert on homelessness, has been named to Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty as a senior fellow. “The Center on Wealth & Poverty has been a national leader in shining a hot spotlight on the flawed federal homelessness polices.” Said Marbut. “Sadly, these policies have created a homelessness crisis in the United States that has become a national disaster, with far reaching negative effects on both individuals experiencing homelessness and local communities.” A major project of the Center on Wealth & Poverty is the Fixhomelessness.org website which focuses on and reports about the root causes of homelessness and recommends public policies that address those causes, not just surface needs. The project exposes the Read More ›
Survival of the Fittest or Survival of the Statist?
John West, Discovery Institute Vice President and author of Darwin Day in America, describes the history of social Darwinism and its influence on economics, government policy, and social institutions.