Since no specific victim and no specific crime has been identified, this is no case of reparation as exists under real justice. It is simply a transfer of wealth from one group to another based on some sort of general "exploitation."
John Rawls claimed "justice" demands governments use their power to benefit the least well off in a given society. But then he arbitrarily restricts the scope of these programs to particular nation-states. This betrays a fundamental problem with his idea of inequality.
In a world of demanding and ever-changing consumers, there is always a way to do things better, with greater quality, and at a lower price. Entrepreneurs must learn how to do this, or they will lose out to those who can.
If capitalism did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it — and its discovery would be rightly regarded as one of the great triumphs of the human mind.
Jeff Deist pithily describes Taleb’s prose as “Rothbard meets Hayek.” But Taleb shares some ideas in common with Ludwig von Mises as well.
Thanksgiving started out as a terribly political holiday. But it has gotten better with age as more people have been interested in beer and football than in politics.
The psychological impact of a lifetime within a fiat money economy cannot be underestimated. With more wealth seemingly available at the click of a computer button, refusal to spend more on government programs must stem only from cruelty and greed.
The Soviets, the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge — these totalitarian regimes would have failed even without any intervention from geopolitical rivals. The socialist systems would have been conquered not by standing armies, but by economics.
In a sense, it is hardly surprising that so little attention has been paid to scandals within universal healthcare systems given the histories of underperformance, scandal, and perpetual crisis associated with many such systems.
The diversion of real funding from the private sector toward government projects — no matter how important these projects appear to be — in fact, disrupts the process of real wealth generation.
