MOST PEOPLE SAY THAT a job is good for making money. So, if you don’t need money, what’s the point? The fabled English aristocratic class of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century apparently thought that way, if the caricatures painted by Jeeves and Wooster, Brideshead, and the like, have any truth to them. Their main job was getting dressed and undressed. It seems like young Americans are thinking the same way.

GARY NORTH RECENTLY SUGGESTED that we count our capitalist blessings and name them one by one, while inviting people to add to a list that would be inexhaustible. My addition: shoes.

A TRAVEL CHANNEL EPISODE OF No Reservations, a cooking-focused show narrated by Anthony Bourdain, took viewers to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I had heard that the show offered unique insight into the country and its troubles. I couldn’t imagine how. But it turns out to be true. Through the lens of food, we can gain an insight into culture, and from culture to economy, and from economy to politics and finally to what’s wrong in this country and what can be done about it.

Can Ideas be Owned?

MY INBOX served up the following email just now:

I’M WATCHING THE MOVIE Unknown, which is about what happens when a man’s identity is stripped away while in a foreign country. Without a passport or any other proof of identity, he is left to wander and then turn to a battle for recapturing who he is. It is a thrilling film in every way, one that taps into a deep anxiety we all have. The whole time, the viewer is thinking: Please God, never let me lose my passport!

FOR YEARS I’VE PUZZLED over the question of why religious people have such trouble coming to terms with economics. This problem applies only to modern religions, for it was Catholics in fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Spain who systematized the discipline of economics to begin with. That was long ago. Today, most of what is written about economics in Catholic circles is painful to read. The failing extends left and right, as likely to appear in “progressive” or “traditionalist” publications.

THE TOPIC OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY is hugely important in the world today, especially with the growing digitization of so many of the goods and services we use every day. For something to be digitized meant to take some portion of that good and transfer it from the realm of scarcity to the realm of infinite reproducibility. Under these conditions, the notion of “intellectual property”—that only one government-privileged monopolist may use a certain idea for a certain period of time—becomes rather preposterous.

WHO ARE THE CAPITALIST folk heroes of our time? The Social Network is a film that celebrates one of the greats, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. It might seem at first like an impossibly boring story that resists movie making: how Facebook came to be founded and grew, meeting trials along the way and becoming the giant that it is today. In fact, it is not only a super exciting and wonderful movie on its own terms; it is probably the finest movie about free enterprise made in our times. It gets entrepreneurship in the real world exactly right.

OLD RIGHT JOURNALIST Garet Garrett described the New Deal as a revolution against America’s tradition of private property, limited government, and the rule of law. Indeed, it had all the earmarks. President Roosevelt ran against government spending and deficits but, once in office, acted like a dictator.

Roosevelt overthrew the traditional limits on government’s role and instituted central planning and welfarism in every sector of the economy.