Cultural depictions of capitalism are almost all negative. There’s the Monopoly guy with the top hat and cigar. There’s Gordon Gekko saying, “Greed is good.” And, most recently, there’s the hedonism of the “Wolf of Wall Street”. The message is clear: capitalism is selfish. Socialism, or something like it, is selfless. In fact, the opposite is true. Renowned social critic Read More ›
Just a generation after capitalism triumphed with the collapse of the Soviet socialist system, a recent Pew poll reports that 49 percent of Americans 18-29 years old have a positive view of socialism while only 46 percent have positive views of capitalism. The ambivalence toward capitalism is due in part to the influence of the information and entertainment class — Read More ›
The adjective that economist Friedrich Hayek famously called a “weasel word” is alive and well in the feel-good phrases social business, social justice and the social gospel. In all three of these phrases, the common weasel word sucks some of the essential meaning out of what it modifies by implying that business, justice, and the Christian Gospel are a-social, or even anti-social, until conjoined Read More ›
The most precious resource in the world economy is human genius, which we may define as the ability to devise significant inventions that enhance survival and prosperity. At any one time, genius is embodied in just a few score thousand people, a creative minority that accounts for most human accomplishment and wealth. Cities and nations rise and thrive when they Read More ›
Assume the villain in a new James Bond movie has the goal of the economic destruction of Europe. How would he do it? First some background. In the 1960s and 1970s, Europe boasted brisk economic growth. From 1965 to 1974, government spending in Western Europe averaged 37 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), and economic growth averaged 4.3 percent Read More ›