The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Economic Growth, and Increase Inequality. By Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles. Oxford University Press, 2017. Viii + 221 pages.

Our criminal justice system offers an interesting paradox. If a criminal commits a violent action against a peaceful person — say, a mugging or a murder — then for justice to be done, the police have to arrest the criminal and try him in a court of law. If convicted, the criminal will be imprisoned where his livelihood is provided by tax dollars, and those taxes will be paid, in part, by the very person he committed the crime against in the first place.

Shutting down the Department of Education and returning control of the education dollar to the American people is the key to improving education. The best way to put the people in charge of education is by shutting down all unconstitutional bureaucracies, repealing the Sixteenth Amendment, and ending the Federal Reserve’s money monopoly.

Market competition is at the heart of the capitalist system. It serves as the driving force for creative innovation, the mechanism by which market supplies and demands are brought into coordinated balance for multitudes of goods, and an institutional setting for individuals to freely find their own place to best earn a living in society.

Mark J. Perry writes this week at AEI:

In 1973 when commercial TV in America was an oligopoly of only three major networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), economist Murray Rothbard, presciently predicted in his book For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto the eventual rise of pay-TV (Netflix, HBO, Showtime, Amazon, etc.).

In 2007 Apple Inc made a move that changed the whole High-Tech world when it launched the first iPhone. The iPhone easily dethroned Nokia, and became the first smartphone that appealed to technophiles, businessmen, and everyday consumers.

This October-November 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the launch of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia — the bloody communist state that would produce a political-ideological killing spree unlike any the world has ever seen.

And yet, communism continues to find supporters. Here are three personal anecdotes:

I did a conference this past week on the legacies of communism. One liberal professor complained that no pro-communist speakers were included. I wasn’t surprised.

In 1944 Professor Hayek emphasised that sustainable employment depends on an appropriate distribution of labour among the different lines of production. This distribution must change as circumstances change. Sustain able employment thus depends on appropriate changes in relative real wage-rates. If established producers—both unions and capitalists—prevent such relative changes from becoming effective, there follows an unnecessary rise in unemployment. Sustainable employment now depends on successfully tackling these established labour and capital monopolies. - Sudha R.