You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.
Thus spoke Ronald Reagan some forty-six years ago.  Tragically, today in America it appears the time for choosing [...]

Government cannot fix America’s problems.  Only innovative, responsible individuals acting according to their own free will can help cure what ails us.  If government could solve all our problems, then government might as well centrally plan society, but as we have seen in every instance in which this has been tried, the sole result has [...]

Ilana Mercer concisely and elegantly makes a point that I’ve been harping on among big-L Libertarians for some time.
“Targeted tax credits” aren’t “incremental moves toward liberty,” they’re just social engineering — shifting the tax burden from those who spend their money the way bureaucrats decide they should spend it, and onto those who spend their [...]

Human flourishing is about enjoying the things that it is good for humans to have. It is more than economic opportunity; it is more than feeling happy or satisfied with life; it is more than safety and security; it is more than good health and longevity; it is more than educational opportunity; it is more [...]

This question arose as I was thinking about the relationship between the determinants of happiness (i.e. survey measures of subjective well-being or SWB) and human flourishing at a national level.
Recent research has been able to explain around 90% of inter-country differences in average SWB in terms of average income levels, enough money for food, healthy [...]

Tuesday’s Hardtalk on BBC World News (link) discussed the political, economic and social aspects of communism versus liberal capitalism with Slavoj Zizek ,a philosopher and professor at European Graduate School.
Mr. Zizek discussed the role of liberal capitalism in the modern age. He condemned communism as a failure of the mankind and reaffirmed the liberal capitalism [...]

Daron Acemoglu wrote a marvelous article discussing the supportive role of incentives and institutions in global poverty reduction and economic development (link):
“If we know why nations are poor, the resulting question is what can we do to help them. Our ability to impose institutions from the outside is limited, as the recent U. S. experiences [...]

Given the massive volume of ridiculous news stories revealing the travesties occurring in this country on a daily basis, I have decided to start regularly posting my thoughts on selected pieces each day. I will continue of course to produce lengthier more substantive pieces as well.
Without further ado, I present today’s Daily Quips:
As Pamela over [...]

Prosperity. However, my initial reaction when I first looked at the index was that it was more like an index of the quality of life or well-being than of prosperity. My perception of prosperity was too narrow. One of the purposes of the index is apparently to encourage people ‘to take a holistic view of [...]

I have an article in Financial Express where I look back economic development in Eastern Europe in the last 20 years, and compare and contrast with India.
In recent weeks, a lot of very interesting writing, looking back at 1989, has come out. My suggestions for further reading follow. Readers of age 40 and below should [...]