Tweet [1]
In this short video, Johan Norberg busts myths about building walls [2].
Want to save wildlife? Promote economic growth, says Matt Ridley [3]. (HT Warren Smith) A slice:
The reason rich people are now able to live alongside wildlife in a way that poor people do not is partly because, once liberated from mere subsistence, they can afford to care. It is also because wealth partly decouples the life of human beings from dependence on wild ecosystems. By eating farmed food, moving to cities, using minerals instead of organic materials, we reduce the need to exploit, or compete with, wildlife.
Bob Higgs notes that corruption in political systems is a feature of those systems, not a bug [4].
Alvaro Vargas Llosa rightly laments the rise of protectionism [5]. Here’s his closing paragraph:
Perhaps the new protectionist era is a good occasion to remake the case for free trade as a bottom-up, mutually rewarding spontaneous activity between consenting peoples, rather than a deliberate, bottom-down framework of political exchanges between governments seeking to gain at each other’s expense.
Here’s Tom Palmer on Hayek [6].
Bob Murphy explores the pitfalls of GDP accounting [7].
Steve Landsburg quotes from Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm [8]:
I cannot understand how any gentleman can be willing to use his intellect for the propagation of untruth, and to be paid for so using it.
Finally, on this especially dreary day in the United States – a day that, by the time the sun sets in California, the world will likely know which of the two creepy, grasping, arrogant, and downright dangerous economic ignoramuses contending for the gaudy power of the U.S. presidency will win that power – here’s a dose of economic good sense from John Cochrane [9]. A slice:
The politically incorrect truth: Allowing Americans to buy from the best supplier and permitting people who want to work and start businesses to immigrate is good for the economy. Trying to impoverish China will not revive America.