regulation

One of the joys of life is outsmarting the bureaucrats and regulators. They are constantly seeking to ruin our lives with demands that we comply. Free men and women must resist.

Trade barriers sound reasonable on paper but in practice they present a nightmare of bureaucracy that harms consumers and businesses alike, while doing very little to actually accomplish their stated goals. What sounds like a noble goal has greatly impacted my ability to enjoy music.

President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord has thrown the world into a blazing furnace full of weeping and gnashing of teeth—or the political world, at least, has been thrown into a fiery tizzy. It's all ridiculous. 

When people think of Peru, they imagine archeological sites like Machu Picchu and delicious food, but few outsiders know that in Lima, the nation’s capital, is the largest film library in Latin America. The collection is housed inside a truly unlikely place: a shopping center. But not just any shopping center. Polvos Azules, a 30-year-old market, started when immigrants from rural regions of the country came to Lima and became street sellers in order to survive.

Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz is one the greatest comedy films ever made. Not only is it a brilliant send-up of classic action movies and a masterwork of writing, editing, and visual humor, it is also an incredible satirical look at what happens when some people decide they know what's best for everyone and justify their actions in the name of the “greater good."
As a result, the film raises a question few people ever stop to seriously ask: What is "the Greater Good"? It sounds like such an intuitive idea, but it's not really that simple.

On May 10th, the Conseil d'Etat, the highest administrative court in France, decided to ask for clarifications from the European Union Court of Justice regarding the recent EU Tobacco Products Directive. The directive would require larger health warnings, banning packs with under 20 cigarettes, banning characterizing flavors like menthol or vanilla, standardizing the shape of all packs, and heavily regulating the sale of e-cigarettes. Beyond the obvious restriction of freedom of choice, when does this regulatory action cross the line to restricting free speech?

From Blockbuster employees to the men who removed horse carcasses from the streets of New York, we’ve seen creative destruction end jobs as unnecessary or unwanted products are replaced with new, better ones. But as surely as creative destruction will replace Uber with self-driving cars, we’ll see strict government regulation to try to keep the old ways from going away.

When certain groups win favors from politicians at the expense of everyone else, it is an especially harsh affront to the economic freedom of the poor. When policy drives prices up, especially in the case of commodities, the higher prices are most difficult for the poor, who are already stretched thin, to absorb.

Entrepreneurship doesn't just mean inventing something new. Sometimes it's when an entrepreneur looks at successful businesses and says, “I can put these together and make something new.” That's how cat cafés started, and they've spread across the world from Asia to Atlanta. So I went to see one.

As the freedom of commercial contract came under attack, the employment contract grew widely in use. In an employment contract, one party agrees to sell his or her time to an employer to perform tasks at the employer’s bidding – a relationship still known to this day as that of “master and servant.”