There I sat in the backseat of the Honda at the Atlanta airport, my Puerto Rican driver ready to drive me home. He has a full-time job, so this job with Lyft is just a side gig he does on Sundays to help make ends meet. What was happening now he had never before experienced. Just as we...

What is the deal with all the strange attacks on the tech sector coming from Republicans and conservatives? It began in 2015, about the time of the rise of Trump in the GOP. Today, the hostility from the right toward tech giants such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook–and Silicon...

It’s not just that Obamacare is financially unsustainable. More seriously, it is intellectually unsustainable, even though this truth has been slow to emerge. This has come to an end with President Trump’s executive order. What does it do? It cuts subsidies to failing providers, yes. It...

I saw the movie Reds when it came out in 1981, and I still rewatch it to this day. After all these years, the movie holds up as one of the most intellectually interesting and visually powerful portrayals of lost history that I’ve seen. The movie stars Warren Beatty playing John...

It feels strange writing about this topic, some 25 years after I had it completely settled in my mind. But nothing is ever really settled, I suppose. The claim that I had long ago concluded was a basic historical and economic fallacy is back in a big way. The claim is that society needs...

What is the future of banking, central banking and financial intermediation in a world in which cryptocurrency is dominant? Let’s speculate a bit, with the proviso that no one can fully anticipate how these markets will evolve. It is no wonder that the ruling class is concerned. We can...

The surprisingly malleable timeline of the Las Vegas shooting reminds me of this quotation from George Orwell’s 1984: “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” This timeline keeps changing for reasons unexplained, and each update...

Last fall, the Arizona Republic ran a huge expose of a strange problem in the city. The city owns 1,400 lots of property, some 2.3 square miles in total, for no apparent reason. They are expensive to maintain, so many have become eyesores and have begun to drag down property values...

Nothing about Jamie Dimon’s anti-Bitcoin explosion (“Bitcoin is a fraud”) made sense. The timing was weird. After all, Bitcoin has proven itself the world over since its first proof-of-concept back in October 2009. There was no real news out there that would have prompted the CEO of JP...

Nearly everyone knows there is something wrong with the world as it is. The liberty-minded person believes that he or she knows a major part of what is wrong. There is not enough flexibility and adaptability in the structures of government that presume to manage the social order. State...