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Shikha Dalmia exposes the foolishness behind Democrats’ criticisms of Education Secretary-designate, Betsy DeVos.

Nick Gillespie and my Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy reflect on Trump and the future of libertarianism.  A slice:

But the hallmark of Trump’s politics is not its populism but its general incoherence. His mind is a landfill of ideas, attitudes, and policies from the postwar era, some of which (such as economic protectionism) that were wildly popular and even somewhat effective (or at least not ruinous) for periods of time. But there is nothing in Trump’s grab-bag of discrepant impulses that can or will speak to the future. That’s because he doesn’t live there, or even in the present. This is a 70-year-old man, after all, who not only dreams of “closing that Internet up in some way” but thinks that Bill Gates is the guy for the job.

Sarah Skwire likes punk shows.

Sean Malone reviews “The Founder.

Nicholas Kristof is optimistic about 2017.  (HT Peter Minowitz)

Here’s Jonah Goldberg on intellectual tribalism.

Part of Jason Brennan’s mission – noble, in my view – “is to downgrade the status we attach to politics.

Bob Higgs has justifiably harsh words for people who hate corporations but love the state.  A slice:

Many Americans (and others) obviously fear corporations more than they fear governments. Indeed, they look to governments to “save” them from grave harm at the hands of vicious corporations and to punish corporations for their evil, destructive actions. On such a mindset a large part of modern Progressivism and other leftist ideologies rests.

R. J. Rummel’s compilations show that approximately 262 million persons were deliberately killed by “their own” governments during the twentieth century alone—many times the number of death’s in that century’s international wars. Rummel calls this death toll “democide.”

It would be an interesting exercise for someone to compile the data for “corporacide,” the number of people deliberately killed by corporations in the same period, the time during which such business organizations were, so to speak, riding highest.

Aside from the fact that corporacide would be found, I am confident, to be close to zero—after all, as a rule, killing people is bad for business—one might call attention to the fact that corporations and other, similar business firms have been responsible for generating the bulk of the wealth that has lifted most of the world’s people out of poverty during the past century or so and for making a substantial portion of the world’s population affluent.

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