Richard Ebeling argues that freedom is why immigrants come to America.
My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan ponders the lack of clarity of modern-day socialists.
Speaking of socialism, why did the Soviets slaughter so many whales?
John Cochrane riffs informatively on Jeffrey Clemens’s recent survey of research on minimum wages.
[Huawei founder] Mr. Ren’s army career, however, was routine for Chinese youths and focused on engineering. As the son of a “capitalist roader,” Mr. Ren launched one of the first fully private firms in mainland China, pioneering a U.S.-style employee stock-ownership plan. Huawei triumphed by outperforming the state-owned enterprises that had previously dominated China’s telecom industry. Huawei’s independent auditor, KPMG, reports no major state subsidies and verifies Huawei’s private ownership structure, with 98.6% owned by employees and 1.4% by Mr. Ren.
George Will is rightly unimpressed with the current crop of Democratic presidential candidates. A slice:
The first substantive sentence — this counts as substance nowadays — in New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s video announcing his candidacy is: “There’s plenty of money in this world, there’s plenty of money in this country, it’s just in the wrong hands.” He is a socialist who means it: Redistribution and nothing but, because wealth creation is so 20th-century, now that there is “plenty” of money sloshing around. His solutions to our national problems include banning Manhattan: “The glass and steel skyscrapers that have contributed so much to global warming” have “no place in our city or on our Earth anymore.” A thought experiment: If O’Rourke, de Blasio and some other presidential candidates were Republican moles insinuated into the Democratic scramble in order to make that party look absurd and the current president look thoughtful, how would they behave differently?
