Articles

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.

There is no such thing as a panacea; few things are actual cure‐​alls in themselves, especially when it pertains to social issues. However, the closest thing to a panacea for contemporary social injustice—both actual and perceived—is the concept of individualism. It is the closest foil to what is, arguably, the most dangerous aspect of critical social justice activism: race fatalism, i.e., the idea that especially minoritized groups have no locus of control and are at the mercy of their hegemonic oppressors.

In a few years, the populists of the Sao Paulo Forum used well-wrought tales to resurrect the greatest failure of a power system, communism, in a triumphant march to take over Latin America. Now he is using his "narrative" powers to help Putin, a classic fascist, to re-integrate fascism with the extreme left and right in the region. And he, convicted of corruption, free on procedural grounds, takes great pride in his ability to put together narratives that hide reality.

As I wrote in the summer of 2018 on CD, I’ve probably created and posted more than 3,000 graphics on CD, Twitter, and Facebook including charts, graphs, tables, figures, maps, and Venn diagrams over the last 15 years. Of all of those graphics, I don’t think any has gotten more attention, links, re-Tweets, re-posts, and mentions than previous versions of the chart above, which was once referred to as “the Chart of the Century.”

From books to series, from movies to political speeches, the mantra goes: capitalism is to blame for all our ills and defending it is heroic.

Until the 1960s, public employees were organized like lawyers, doctors and other voluntary professional associations. They had no legal right to compel government to enter into contracts. Many already enjoyed civil service protections, and government work was generally sleepy, not ruthless. But public employees had become a huge voting bloc, and leaders of public employee associations wanted power over how government was run.