The 19th century brought creation and expansion of railroads in the United States that hauled freight and carried paying passengers. One offshoot from privately-owned railroads was the creation of company-built and -operated hospitals to treat their employees in remote locations. Railroad worker professions had a high injury rate with loss of limbs, severe injuries, and death. This is an example of private businesses seeing a real problem and initiating a process to solve it without federal government help.

As the language of Marxism becomes increasingly disguised in moralistic slogans such as “social justice” and “inclusiveness,” many people fail to recognize Marxist theories when they encounter them. They expect theories derived from Marxism to be littered with red flag phrases like “dialectical materialism” or “class conflict,” which would be the dead giveaway that they are dealing with Marxist interpretations. In the absence of such phrases, they deny that social justice theories are Marxist at all. 

Alex Pollock has questions for the Federal Reserve in the Financial Times.

Various tools and machinery that individuals have produced were produced in order to better produce consumer goods. The quantity and the quality of various tools and machinery—capital goods—places a limit on the quantity and the quality of the production of consumer goods. Through the introduction of better capital goods, greater output can be secured more productively and efficiently.

NBC Boston’s multi-episode coverage of the Free State Project included a naysayer complaining that the movers to New Hampshire are only doing so because they are minorities in their home states. I ask, does this make the project illegitimate?

This seems to be the way of the world in my estimation. Here’s a sampling of several similar minorities who moved in some coordinated mass of one kind or the other:

When my friends and I landed in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands (USVI) in the summer of 2023, we assumed getting around would be a breeze. It is a US territory, after all. We were unpleasantly surprised to find this was not the case. Instead—too young to rent a car—we were met with no rideshare apps (Uber, Lyft, etc.) and left with only a handful of dirty, expensive, dubiously safe, and slow-to-arrive taxis.

The government has essentially handed control of ride services on the islands to a cartel of licensed taxi drivers—and they abuse this crony privilege to the fullest.

Born and raised in St. Louis, Paul Heyne (1931–2000) began his higher education as a divinity student at the local Concordia Lutheran Seminary and became an ordained minister, though never a pastor. He then earned a master’s degree in economics at Washington University in St. Louis, and a PhD in Ethics and Society at the University of Chicago. He spent most of his adult life teaching economics while retaining a deep interest in questions of ethics.

China’s rise is often portrayed as unstoppable. It dominates global supply chains, pours money into research and development (R&D), and boasts some of the world’s largest tech companies. But scratch beneath the surface of this economic juggernaut, and a picture of structural inefficiencies, inflated innovation claims, and deep technological dependencies emerges. For all its ambition, China is caught in a trap: it is trying to act like a high-tech superpower while stuck with the productivity levels and export profile of a middle-income country.