What if the United States were really and truly a low-tax country whereby legislators, bound and dedicated to the Founders’ deep skepticism about government, made it their legislative aim to severely limit the flow of dollars to the U.S. Treasury? The question is an idealistic one, and for obvious reasons: politicians love that people […]
Book Review: Shadi Hamid’s Excellent “The Case for American Power” Read More »
As the illness of the late Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane escalated, and with it Crane’s pessimism about how much time he had left, I would tell him he had to stick around lest the members of our weekly lunch crew retreat into fallacious thinking, including – gasp – conventional conservative wisdom. There was reason for
Book Review: Eswar Prasad’s “The Doom Loop” Read More »
I read Atlas Shrugged in 1994. It was also in 1994 that I first read about cable television visionary John Malone. He was in the news quite a bit thanks to the growing prominence of cable, but also because Al Gore had formerly referred to him as “Darth Vader.” It’s hard to say why, but Malone
Book Review: John Malone’s Spectacular “Born to Be Wired” Read More »
I’ve seen Barry Diller four times in public. First at a restaurant in Sag Harbor, two more times at Manhattan restaurant Michael’s, and last at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. I knew who he was, he not me, but at Hoover I walked up and shook his hand to tell him what a big admirer I
Book Review: Barry Diller’s Excellent “Who Knew” Read More »
The Merval, Argentina’s benchmark equity index, soared 22 percent the day after the recent vote. Markets had been pricing in big electoral gains for the Peronist parties, only for Javier Milei’s market liberal Liberty Advances party to reveal unexpected strength. The market surge in Argentina is a reminder that equities don’t just rally, nor
Book Review: Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “1929” Read More »
It’s not infrequently said that Adam Smith “invented” capitalism with his publication The Wealth of Nations, but the real truth (one stressed by Matthew Hennessey in Visible Hand) is that Smith reported on capitalism as it was happening. That’s because profit-motivated human action is as natural as breathing, as opposed to something humans needed instruction in. What arguably
Book Review: Martin Cruz Smith’s “Gorky Park” Read More »
Americans consumed just as much Arab oil during the 1973 OPEC “embargo” as they did before it. By some accounts, they consumed more. Which is a reminder that if you’re producing, you’re trading with the world. And vice versa. So-called “Arab oil” that the Arab members of OPEC weren’t selling directly into the U.S.
Book Review: Simon Kuper’s “Chums” Read More »
The Calendar section in the Los Angeles Times used to be thick Monday through Saturday, and then near book-length on Sundays. So many ads promoting released and soon-to-be-released films, and so many articles about the movie industry that has long animated business activity in Los Angeles. The Calendar section, and surely Variety to a smaller but much more
Book Review: Ed Zwick’s “Hits, Flops and Other Illusions” Read More »
Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane long advised staffers to read the New York Times, including me. Many would give him quizzical looks owing to the newspaper’s left lean, but that was part of his point. Not only would reading it daily place libertarian Cato readers in the other team’s “huddle,” Crane recognized that the writers
Book Review: Max Frankel’s Endlessly Excellent “The Times of My Life” Read More »
I was living at 537 W. Deming in the Lincoln Park section of Chicago in the summer of 1995. The address and city rate mention because that summer Chicago suffered one of those brutal and nationally notable heat waves. The kind that could claim a high death count. Where it became interesting, while also
Book Review: Salvatore Basile’s “Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything” Read More »
