Here (link) is the story of how decades of economic freedom prevent the unthinkable consequences of an earthquake which recently damaged Chile.

This follows on from my last post: Do all well-being indicators tell similar stories about human flourishing? The indicators that I looked at did tend to tell similar stories – countries that have high average income levels also tend to have high rankings on other well-being indicators.
The purpose of this post is to extend the [...]

American populist angst has been rising for some time now. The optimist in me hopes that the Tea Party movement, and with it the rekindling within Americans of the vision of the founders and the defense of our Constitution can “fundamentally transform the United States of America” to coin a phrase from our old socialist [...]

Tom Slee has written a book entitled No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart. The introduction of the book ends with “why we need to rely on collective action rather than individual choice to take us to where we want to be”.
Poor Tom! He fantasizes that once the tools of coercive collective action are created, [...]

In his comments in “The Australian” (8 Sept. ’09) on Paul Kelly’s new book, “The March of Patriots”, Kevin Rudd attempts to make a distinction between the economic reforms of the Hawke-Keating Labor governments and those of the Howard conservative government. Rudd describes the Hawke-Keating reforms as “modernising our economy to make it more competitive [...]

The Gallup World Poll has asked people in a large number of countries: “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?” Recent research has shown that, even after controlling for other relevant variables, people tend to be more satisfied with their lives in countries in which a [...]

David Cay Johnston has written a book on a very important topic, the corporate welfare that occurs on a massive scale. Unfortunately, Mr. Johnston takes a very important topic and shoots it so full of populist sensationalism that it is hard to take him seriously. One of the main building blocks of his hype building [...]