Imagine you are in a car accident on New Year’s Eve. Like Jason Bourne as the CIA agent in The Bourne Identity, you wake up to a strange new reality: You don’t know who you are, where you are, or…
Free enterprise uses a simple conjuring trick to great effect: It gives people what they want. Still more, it is constantly coming up with new things they like even better. Think of the development of smart phones, online commerce, Google,…
St. Louis, Missouri Are you a government-failure denier — someone who believes that the government that governs best is one that overflows with good intentions, regardless of the cost or outcome? Are you someone who thinks a lot about “market…
Let’s say employers must pay a substantially higher wage for all unskilled labor. Would this requirement lift many people out of poverty? Still more, would it lead to greater general prosperity? Everything does come up roses — if you ignore costs…
St. Louis Let us consider one of the basic building blocks of economics: the law of unintended consequences. All too often, human actions — especially government actions — backfire and harm the very people they are supposed to benefit. Price…
“All I know,” the British socialist Beatrice Webb confided in her diary in 1932 as she and her husband Sidney were writing a laudatory two-volume history of the Soviet Union, “is that I wish Russian communism to succeed.” The playwright…
The most closely watched contest in the Aug. 7 elections in Missouri will not be any of the political races; it will be the resolution of an important policy question. In the referendum known as Proposition A, voters will have…
In 1985, Ronald Reagan “jawboned” the Japanese into accepting “voluntary” restraints on exports of Japanese cars to the United States. At the same time, he drew a line in the sand between himself and U.S. congressmen calling for much stronger…