Can self-government exist alongside centralized intelligence agencies?  Espionage agencies seek secrets and keep secrets.  To the extent that they inform the public what they know, they decide which secrets can be disclosed.  Now this may be the only way for a clandestine service to operate, but it certainly does not equip the public to make fully-informed decisions.  When choosing which policies or representatives to support, voters know nothing of substance within the classified world. Western nations that call themselves “democracies” try to […]

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I first met the free-market journalist Henry Hazlitt (1894–1993) in June of 1974 at an Austrian economics conference in South Royalton, Vermont. I had been reading his articles and books for years, since I was around 14 or 15 years old, not long after I became interested in classical-liberal and libertarian ideas.  His famous volume Economics in One Lesson (1946), which is now celebrating its 80th anniversary, had helped open my eyes to the nature of the market […]

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“Reflect on what happens when a terrible winter blizzard strikes. You hear the weather warning but probably fail to act on it. The sky darkens. Then the storm hits with full fury, and the air is a howling whiteness. One by one, your links to the machine age break down. Electricity flickers out, cutting off the TV. Batteries fade, cutting off the radio. Phones go dead. Roads become impossible, and cars get stuck. Food supplies dwindle. Day to […]

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If Europe wants to excel at tech and innovation, it needs to stop throttling the marketplace with regulations and taxes. Nor should Europe copy the China model of subsidies and corporate welfare.

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