gates

Recently, Bill Gates went to Harvard for an interesting Q&A:

History always kind of oversimplifies. There were people who did things that completely failed but were very suggestive of the right answer.

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available resources

Nobel laureate Milton Friedman makes an important point about the availability of resources:

What matters are the resources which are available to be used, not those that will be discovered later on.

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four options

Joachim Voth, professor of economics at Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, describes and discusses four scenarios for the Euro’s future:

We are destroying a huge amount of the good work created by the European Union, almost over night as a result of the current policy mix.

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free enterprise system

Decades ago, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman discussed the impact of intellectuals and businessmen on the free enterprise system:

You must separate out being pro free enterprise from being pro business.

The two greatest enemies of the free enterprise system have been on the one hand my fellow intellectuals and on the other the big businessmen. For opposite reasons:

The intellectual is all in favor of freedom for himself and all opposed to it for everybody else.

Almost every businessman is in favor of free enterprise for everybody else but special privileges for himself.

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what if jefferson was right

Similar to the famous ‘what if’ speech by Ron Paul, two years ago Andrew Napolitano raised some ‘what if’ questions:

What if Jefferson was right? What if that government is best which governs the least?

What if you could love your country but hate what the government has done to it?

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equality

Often statistics is used in the media with the intention to emphasize some disparity. And whenever the topic is wages, the distinction between disparity and inequality becomes blurred. Economist Thomas Sowell describes the absurdity of this perspective:

Nowhere in the world do you find this evenness that people use as a norm. And I find it fascinating that they will hold up as a norm something that has never been seen on this planet and regard as an anomaly something that is seen in country after country.

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women’s day

About a century ago, the Socialist Party of America called for the first national Women’s Day. Over the years movements started and today, March 8 has become the International Women’s Day (IWD) and events take now place in almost all of the world’s countries.

To buck the trend, Thomas Sowell and Peter Robinson dissect the argument that employer discrimination lies at the core of male-female economic differences:

If we become fixed on eliminating male-female income differences, is it the case that the only choice for doing that is to involve the government in redesigning the very nature of the family?

One of the commentators on youtube sets up the following hypothesis:

Liberals need the populace to feel victimized because if they weren’t, then they’d have to take responsibility for their own actions. But why take control of your own life and it’s outcome when you can just blame your shortcomings on your skin color, sexuality, or gender?

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a video of a pencil

I already wrote about Leonard E. Read’s essay “I, Pencil” last year: economics in two minutes. But now the Competitive Enterprise Institute has produced a beautiful video that also tells the story:

Each part of the pencil is the result of the collaboration and cooperation of millions of people.

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modern pyramids

We will never forget that one day eleven years ago:

Today we feel what Franklin Roosevelt called the warm courage of national unity.

But we should not only commemorate today. We should also stop and think, if only for the novelty of it. ReasonTV asks the question, “When Did Honoring the Dead Become an Occassion for Fleecing the Living?”:

*points to pyramids*

A long time ago. Not surprisingly, a government was involved then too.

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nice teachers

One of the many reasons for the decline in the educational system in several Western countries might be nice teachers, as Thomas Sowell points out:
(text to be found here)

After a couple of decades of treating children as if they were as fragile as tissue paper, the net result is that Johnny can’t read and can’t think but often has a presumptuousness that deep thinkers call maturity.

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