Oct 21
(Pictured above: visionary and futurist Julian Simon) After a century of needless regulation, and hundreds of thousands if not millions of violent arrests of drivers for traffic violations, the era of driverless cars is upon us. Dozens of private firms, including Tesla, Apple, Google, GM, Honda and many others, are already producing driverless-car prototypes which …
Oct 05
The U.S. Postal Service lost $5.5 billion in 2014 and has lost many more billions over the past decade. Even as global trade, communications and shipping has skyrocketed, the Postal Service can’t operate efficiently. U.S. Postal workers are greatly overpaid. Hundreds, even thousands, apply for every opening. It might be said that the PRIMARY purpose …
Sep 29
The history of humanity is a history of people wanting to control their neighbors through government–and of their neighbors (and ultimately, themselves) fleeing the governmental environments they created for freer shores. England, for example, was widely known to be freer than continental Europe throughout the past thousand years. Vagabonds, exiles and wandering gypsies from throughout …
Sep 16
Europe and its colonies–especially British colonies–led the way in global prosperity and innovation between the 1600s and the 1900s. Small governments, constitutional law, and the industrial revolution led the people of the West to lead the world. Now a new report indicates that Asian societies–especially those in southeast-Asian nations that have mostly rejected socialism and …
Sep 12
For decades, the act of driving a cab has been preposterously overregulated. Government hacks in almost every jurisdiction have enacted stupid laws and policies requiring government licensing and approval of all cab companies. In many states, cab companies are ridiculously regulated as “public utilities” like water and electricity. Cab companies, in turn, have paid off …
Aug 17
John Mackey is the cofounder and CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation, Whole Foods. As many libertarians know, Mr. Lackey identifies as something of a libertarian, and he has made a number of fairly courageous statements about various state-authoritarian policies (such as the government’s slave-plantation healthcare). Here is a decent interview of Mr. Mackey by …
Aug 04
The two major American “political parties” are largely two sides of the same coin: they both trust and support expansive and intrusive government. Polling has consistently shown that American voters–often by supermajorities–view their own taxes as too high. See here. The average American, when asked, states that the U.S. government wastes 51 cents of every …
Aug 03
Today, August 3, 2015, Puerto Rico failed to make a $58 million dollar payment on its debt. See here. The defaulting commonwealth is some $70 BILLION in debt. But just a few years ago, Puerto Rico was on a path to economic growth and dynamism. Puerto Rican voters elected Luiz Fortuno as their governor in …
Jul 31
To operate a taxi cab business is to navigate through one of the most over-regulated industries in the world. But the actual act of cab-driving is relatively simple, and poor people of limited means should be able to participate and enter the market. This disconnect is caused by decades of stupid overregulation of the taxi …
Jul 29
During the hot 1990s, many government scientists predicted Arctic Ice would be gone during the summers, by 2013. Al Gore’s famous film “An Inconvenient Truth,” claimed that Arctic sea ice would be gone in the summer as early as 2015. But by the time 2013 came around, Arctic sea ice had grown by 533,000 square …
