Entrepreneurship

I want to focus on how these times relate to history and how we can change the future by applying the economic way of thinking. I am therefore going to draw your attention to four different themes.

The envy-driven masses do not care a whit for what the demagogues call the "bourgeois" concern for freedom of conscience, of thought, of the press, for habeas corpus, trial by jury, and all the rest. They long for the earthly paradise that the socialist leaders promise them.

As "left" and "right" categories dissolve and become increasingly meaningless on the American ideological scene, as young people, with the collapse of both the SDS-Left and the liberal "consensus," grope toward a new philosophy and a new orientation,  right-libertarianism may ascend.

Legal or not, destruction is animal-like behavior. It's one thing when it is done by wild pigs. But when identical forms of destruction are sponsored by the state, we are talking about a form of brutality that is purely man-made.

Anyone who has worked in middle management has likely, at one time or another, had their big boss pass out some dopey management books that especially touched the hamster-brained sociopath (as Scott Adams would say) who was in charge of operations.

The honor of being called the "father of modern economics" belongs not to its usual recipient, Adam Smith, but to a gallicized Irish merchant, banker, and adventurer who wrote the first treatise on economics more than four decades before the publication of the Wealth of Nations.

Julian Assange cracked the government's veil of benignity and brought into question the state's tactics. So the state must destroy him.

Government and the media bombard us with examples of real or often just imagined threats and expand them so that they become as big as our worst nightmares. As more of us buy into an overblown story, it takes on a life of its own and often becomes the accepted truth.

It's not as if TSA officials had said all along, since 2001, that they needed full-body scanners in order to do their jobs properly. Had they said that in the beginning, then the public probably would've protested enough such that the "small-government" George Bush wouldn't have nationalized airport security.

The Keurig coffee maker is another landmark in the long struggle to leave the state of nature and climb to ever-higher stages of the great chain of being. At each stage, we can easily observe the path from the collective to the individual.