Mark Perry quotes Adam Smith on the virtues of free trade.
Also from Mark Perry: praise for Amazon.com.
Marian Tupy explains that the foreign-aid industry is a racket.
“Greek Anarchists Provide Services the State Doesn’t”
Here’s a fun lesson about the role of prices from newly minted GMU Econ PhD Joy Buchanan.
Kevin Williamson reviews the current state of Trump, Trumpism, and anti-Trumpism.
Arnold Kling has just started to read a new book by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding). A slice from Arnold’s post:
Taking human beings as social animals subject to various departures from pure rationality, market exchange is still a very defensible mode of human interaction. Markets help to organize large-scale specialization and cooperation. Markets are effective learning mechanisms. If Mercier and Sperber are going to claim that our collective brain works in spite of (and perhaps even because of) the flaws of our individual reason, then I am prepared to claim that the market system is often the best tool for taking advantage of that collective brain.