Here’s my colleague Bryan Caplan contrasted with Michael Lind on the question of open borders.
Cliff Asness, Aaron Brown, Michael Mendelson, and Hitesh Mittal offer important insights into the value of high-frequency trading. (HT Greg Mankiw)
The creativity and fortitude of entrepreneurs, the skillful risk-taking by investors and the insight and effort of managers are all strangely absent throughout Piketty’s performance. These very fonts of modern prosperity are at best assumed to play uninterestingly routine and unseen roles backstage. Onstage, capital — the stuff that is in fact created and skillfully steered by flesh-and-blood entrepreneurs, investors and managers — appears to grow spontaneously, without human involvement.
Piketty promotes the politics of envy, in which greater equality is a goal in itself — as opposed to the goal of helping out those at the bottom of the income distribution — and Piketty plainly states that the policies he recommends to reduce inequality would do so by pulling down those at the top rather than bringing up those at the bottom.
Indeed. It is truly – yet sadly – astonishing that attitudes and behaviors that rightly bring down punishment on children who exhibit them on the playground (envying the toys that others have and ganging up to take from those who are perceived to have more toys) are regarded as progressive, humane, and just when exhibited by adult voters and when encouraged in adults by adult professors, pundit, politicians, and preachers. Such attitudes are inexcusably uncivilized, destructive, immoral, and (contrary to “Progressives'” fancies) antediluvian.
Richard Rahn explains some of the many benefits of keeping government small and economies free.
