Tag: scarcity
Famine is about freedom, not just food
March 26, 2017 | Post
How can people still starve in a world overflowing with food and a vast international aid apparatus?
Why it would be madness to produce all our own food
March 14, 2017 | Post
There’s a reason why, in times of war, countries have blockaded others.
Explaining the Protectionist Instinct
February 10, 2017 | Post
One of the gravest economic mistakes that humans can make is to forget that ours is unavoidably a world of scarcity.
How defending capitalism is like recycling
November 26, 2016 | Post
Recycling is one example of an action that we take in the present to benefit a group in the future.
What is the point of reading?
November 14, 2016 | Post
Why should students read big, difficult books if they have perfectly good summaries available to them?
Why don’t we allow markets to dictate parking policy?
November 10, 2016 | Post
A market for parking free of government manipulation would reduce inequality, improve the environment, and make cities more livable.
The economics within Star Wars: The Force Awakens
October 30, 2016 | Post
Thanks to people like Rey, secondhand power converters make their way into the hands of idealistic young future pilots shopping at Tosche Station.
Free trade brings abundance — protectionism brings scarcity
September 29, 2016 | Post
When it comes to trade, the best US policy, or that of any country, is the elimination of all barriers to imports. This can be done unilaterally. Abundance should always be preferred to scarcity.
Science: A Short Story
September 4, 2016 | Post
Several years ago Uncle Sam declared Jones, a man in his mid-40s, to be uniquely entitled to retire immediately at double his real annual income of $100,000 for life. Jones took Uncle Sam up on this offer. Each and every year until Jones enters oblivion Uncle Sam now transfers to him $200,000. Jones is made […]
When to Use Heuristics and When to Use Rational Thought
August 20, 2016 | Post
Doing the research necessary to make good choices can be very time consuming. That’s why, as we learned in the last video, people resort to using heuristics to make better decisions. In the Learn Liberty video below, Professor Antony Davies and graduate student Erika Davies explain how people sometimes rely too heavily on heuristics, which can lead […]
Greener than Thou?
May 23, 2016 | Post
I have a confession to make. I don’t recycle as many people understand the term. I try to reduce and reuse-I “recycle” shirts, towels, dishes, and the like in that I don’t discard them after one use, but several years ago I stopped recycling in the sense that I don’t put bottles, cans, and newspaper […]
We Can Never Run Out of Anything
February 5, 2016 | Post
Somewhere along about 2005 I started hearing about “Peak _____,” where the blank is some resource such as oil, water, food, and so on. The pique about “Peak” was based on the notion that “we” (and I’m not sure what that means) had reached the point of maximum production, and that the future was a […]
Featured On Demand Program of the Week: The Immigration Debate
November 2, 2015 | Post
With presidential contenders like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders making a fuss about foreign laborers coming to the country and depressing wages or murdering our women and children immigration reform has once again moved to the front lines of presidential politics. Have you ever wanted to cut through the demagoguery and fear-mongering and get plain […]