We have been hearing a great deal about income inequality in recent days, particularly from Senator Bernie Sanders. Part of this interest is fueled by many examples of excess at the top. J.P. Morgan Chase, after a year immersed in scandal, decided to award its chief executive, Jamie Dimon, $20 million in compensation for 2013. [...]
Too many people have a naïve belief in the freedom of the market. Big companies like Starbucks do not compete fairly with their smaller rivals but seek to eradicate them. There’s nothing like starting the New Year with a new controversy. My recent essay, “Finding Freedom in Your Pocket,” prompted a scathing response from one [...]
Bernie Sanders, the Democrats’ only (openly) socialist presidential candidate joined the chorus of criticism against Walmart a while back. But many conservatives also spend a good deal of time and effort criticizing the discount store giant. The mass hysteria of Christmas shopping season provides an opportunity to reconsider Walmart—at least to a certain, limited extent. [...]
Will we, before it is too late, use the vitality and the magic of the marketplace to save this way of life, or will we one day face our children, and our children’s children when they ask us where we were and what we were doing on the day that freedom was lost? Ronald Reagan [...]
David Mamet is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, film and television director, and author of many books of essays, most recently, in 2011, of the crackling libertarian manifesto, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. The target of Mamet’s book is an updated version of Rousseau’s noble savage: a 21st-century peace-loving tribesman whose Eden it [...]
According to the Washington Post, Washington DC’s public school district is planning to close 15 under-enrolled traditional schools: “If we don’t become very serious about marketing and competing with charter schools," [DC Councilman David] Catania said, “traditional public schools, as we know them, will become a thing of the past.” Charter schools have grown quickly [...]
The human body needs some stressors, and everything organic and complex communicates with the environment via stressors.—Nassim Nicholas Taleb Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, is back with a new book: Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder. He recently sat down with Reason’s Nick Gillespie for an interview. Taleb makes [...]