10 Facts about World Poverty That Will Shock You

Photo by CIMMYT 10. The free market limits power In a competitive market, no actor has the power to set prices, and thus no actor has power over any other. The system runs itself, no one fights, and no one tells anyone else what to do. Unlike the communist utopia where an all-powerful, all-knowing, and…

Given the actions of the Federal Reserve, particularly over the last twenty years or so, we have become accustomed to the fixing of interest rates as normal. Indeed, there appear to be benefits for many from such policies, at least in the near term. After all, given mortgage rates as low as 2% to 3%,…

Outsourcing — sending manufacturing or services work abroad where it can be done more cheaply — can be a tough sell in the best of times. It’s even more of a challenge when jobs in the U.S. are already hard to find, making it painful to think of precious jobs being shipped overseas. If only…

We hear about it all the time. After a natural disaster, or during times of civil unrest such that transpired recently in Ferguson, businesses price gouge items in high demand. Water or a ride away from a dangerous area become expensive commodities. The instinct is to chastise such actions as immoral and selfish. But a…

The main problem with welfare such as unemployment benefits, or government handouts, is that it de-capitalizes the productive members of society and capitalizes unproductive members. The productive members are the entrepreneurs. Those who predict what goods consumers will demand in the future and produce them in the present. When the government imposes taxes, it takes…

Regulatory Capture is a  process by which regulatory agencies become dominated and directed by the corporations or special interests they are supposed to be regulating. It’s like putting the mafia in charge of writing regulations for bookmaking. Most generally associated with Nobel laureate George Stigler and postulated as an actual theory in the early 1970’s,…