In a recent interview, Tarek Mansour, the co-founder of Kalshi—a company with a marketplace where users gamble on the outcome of future events—said “the long-term vision [of the company] is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”
This article is adapted from a lecture presented at the 2025 Supporters Summit in Delray Beach, Florida.
Economic freedom should include freedom in money. It’s a freedom even, as we say these days, that advanced economies don’t have. My guiding text for this talk is Friedrich Hayek’s celebrated essay “Choice in Currency.” That is chapter 7 of this excellent book—Hayek for the 21st Century: Essays in Political Economy—that the Mises Institute has published. It’s a classic text, and I hope you’ll all take a look at it if you haven’t.
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This article is adapted from a lecture presented at the 2025 Supporters Summit in Delray Beach, Florida.
Anyone who is paying a modicum of attention can see we live in troubled times. We have inherited a civilization made possible by peace and prosperity, but presently man is everywhere in conflict. It may seem that this is a recent phenomenon, but the idea that conflict between social groups is normal and inevitable goes back a long time.
In a 1787 letter, Benjamin Franklin wrote to a colleague, “I am of the same opinion with you respecting the freedom of commerce. . . . Nothing can be better expressed than your sentiments are on this point, where you prefer liberty of trading, cultivating, manufacturing, etc., even to civil liberty, this being affected but rarely, the other every hour.”
President Trump recently signed an executive order changing marijuana’s Controlled Substances Act classification from Schedule I to Schedule III. Schedule I is supposed to include especially dangerous drugs that are likely to be abused and have no medical purpose. Whatever one thinks of the wisdom and morality of using marijuana, the fact is it is less addictive, and quite possibly safer, than alcohol. Many Americans who live in one of the 40 states that have legalized medicinal marijuana use it for a variety of ailments.
