Bureaucracy and Regulation

In this week’s Friday Philosophy, Dr. David Gordon takes on Daron Acemoglu’s What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity and finds it lacking in economic sense.

Cronyism and protecting the scenic views of the wealthy.

A brief episode of competition in the early telephone industry demonstrates that, even when hampered, competitive pressure challenged the state-created telephone monopoly. Exploring this territory allows us to imagine the possibilities of what could have been in true a free market.

Murray Rothbard wrote many years ago that government regulation, ostensibly created to protect consumers, actually protects incumbent producers from competition. Decades later, nothing has changed.

Everyone loves to have time off, but what happens when governments force people not to work against their will?

Our history books tell us about how Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. They don’t tell us that his company then successfully got the government to grant it monopoly powers, thus harming consumers and stifling technological innovation for nearly a century.

As the birthrate falls in the US and other industrialized countries, we find that government intervention into the economy and family life is a big reason this is happening.

An article of faith with modern progressives is that all social problems can be solved with the growth and application of the administrative state. They have faith in the wrong thing.

In this week's Friday Philosophy, Dr. David Gordon takes issue with the DEI movement in higher education, pointing to the utterly absurd case of Jason Arday, a professor of the sociology of education at Cambridge University, as DEI's poster child.

Mutual aid societies once were an important part of the US social landscape. Africans can benefit from the same movements—provided their governments get out of the way.