Articles

In the midst of the maelstrom of detrimental issues that daily lacerate our spirit of survival in Puerto Rico, a bill is filed that bursts into the conscience of artistic expression born from bodily movement. The country is once again collapsing due to the lack of essential services -such as electricity and aqueducts- affecting even the purity of the primary electoral event for the 2024 electoral contest. On the other hand, the illegal release of prisoners of high danger of violence, such as murderers, rapists, kidnappers, among others, was recently uncovered. However, attention is diverted towards the State that focuses its persecutory light to detect its critics in order to placate them. Strangling their thinking and their capacity for economic subsistence, to get them out of the way, is the way to prevent them from hindering their political power.

Understanding and internalizing Puerto Rico's loss of competitiveness vis-à-vis other jurisdictions in the hemisphere has caused a lot of commotion. Countries such as Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic have focused in the past decades on creating optimal conditions to aggressively promote Foreign Direct Investment. While in Puerto Rico we explore innovative initiatives on how to squeeze and undermine foreign investment by imposing onerous taxes; while in Puerto Rico we consider the possibility of invalidating labor laws that cause us to lose our attractiveness to investment; while Puerto Rico reflects insecurity to foreign direct investment, the countries in the area make life easier for investors.

Several states are facing a shortage of skilled workers, and many have responded by cutting red tape around their occupational licensing laws. Unlike a driver’s license, which you can use across state lines, occupational licenses often impose barriers that limit where you’re allowed to work. That means a worker licensed in one state may have to get re-trained or pay additional fees if they move somewhere else, even if they’re doing the same job.

Jokes about the abundance of “ambulance chasers” aside, the fact is that some parts of America face a shortage of lawyers rather than the surplus that those critical of the profession might expect. Although New York City and Washington, DC, have a high concentration of lawyers, nearly 1,300 counties across the country have less than one lawyer per thousand residents, according to a 2020 American Bar Association report. So‐​called legal deserts are especially common in rural areas, where children and less affluent adults may find it difficult or impossible to secure representation.

Governments are jettisoning the principles that made the world rich. Homeland economics will be tough to restrain. People enjoy spending other people’s money. As government budgets get bigger, the special interests that feed on them will grow in size and influence. It is harder to withdraw protection and handouts than to grant them—particularly with more elderly voters, who have less of a stake in economic growth. Anyone doe-eyed about the arc of history bending towards progress should remember that a century ago Argentina was about as rich as Switzerland.

For Mr. Sowell, the tremendous variety of geographic, cultural and demographic differences among groups makes anything approximating an even distribution of preferences, habits and skills close to impossible. The progressive left holds up as a norm a state the world has never seen, and regards as an anomaly something seen in societies all over the world and down through history. “There’s this sort of mysticism that disparities must show that someone’s done something wrong” to a lagging group, Mr. Sowell says. The social-justice vision “starts off by reducing the search for causation to a search for blame. And for so much of what happens, there is no blame.”

After a difficult period of adjustment in the 1980s, New Zealand agricultural productivity quadrupled.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to look through a transcription of a set of note cards that F. A. Hayek kept through the latter years of his life. It was fascinating to see how he wrote for himself and to get glimpses of ideas that would later be more fully fleshed out. One theme that emerges in those cards, and that has been pervasive over Hayek’s career, is his understanding of freedom. It is a nuanced and sophisticated conception of human freedom that differentiates itself from the ways the term is used by the left and the right. Classical liberals should understand Hayek’s view of freedom, and its connection to tradition and the coordinating role of institutions, to avoid the problems that confront other conceptions of freedom.