The Free To Choose Network Blog

How Moral Hazard Inflated the 2008 Housing Bubble

December 22nd, 2025FreeToChooseNetwork0 Comments

In our last post, we explored how the 2008 financial crisis happened because policymakers thought they could manage the economy like a machine—setting interest rates, guiding lending, engineering outcomes. They couldn’t. The knowledge problem meant they were making decisions based on information they simply didn’t have and couldn’t have. But there’s another piece to this puzzle, one that’s just as important for understanding what went wrong: moral hazard. The term sounds technical, but the concept is straightforward. Moral hazard happens when someone gets to make decisions but doesn’t have to live with the full consequences of those decisions. When the …

Episode 256 – The Evolution of Socialized Medicine: Health Care Reform Today (Podcast)

Today’s podcast is titled “The Evolution of Socialized Medicine: Health Care Reform Today.” Recorded in 1994, Dennis McCuistion, former Clinical Professor of Corporate Governance and Executive Director of the Institute for Excellence in Corporate Governance at the University of Texas at Dallas, past president of the American Medical Association and World Medical Association and author of Code Blue: Health Care in Crisis Dr. Edward Annis and Commissioner of the Texas Department of Health, board-certified pediatrician Dr. David Smith discuss the need for public health infrastructure, tort reform, and the role and effectiveness of government versus market-based solutions. Listen now, and …

Lisa Su On When You Should Bet Big On Talent

December 17th, 2025FreeToChooseNetwork0 Comments

Every entrepreneur faces this dilemma: You have a critical role to fill, and there’s a candidate who shows real potential. But they haven’t done this exact job before. Their resume doesn’t check every box. The safe choice would be to keep looking for someone with a perfect track record. What if playing it safe is actually the riskier move? Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, built one of tech’s most remarkable turnarounds by taking risks on people. Under her leadership, AMD grew from $4 billion to over $23 billion in revenue, with shares rising from $2 to $200. When evaluating candidates, …

Can You Really Manage an Economy Like a Machine? Let’s Ask 2008.

December 11th, 2025FreeToChooseNetwork0 Comments

“If we could just get the right people in charge, we could fix this.” It’s tempting, isn’t it? When the economy tanks and people lose their jobs and homes, wouldn’t it be better if smart, well-intentioned experts could just… manage things? Set the right interest rates, guide money to the right places, make sure loans go to people who can actually pay them back, stop bubbles before they get too big? This idea—that economies work like machines you can tune and adjust—shaped pretty much every decision that led to the 2008 financial crisis. There’s just one problem: economies aren’t machines. …

Episode 255 – The Controversy Over Affirmative Action (Podcast)

Today’s podcast is titled “The Controversy Over Affirmative Action.” Recorded in 1997, Dennis McCuistion, former Clinical Professor of Corporate Governance and Executive Director of the Institute for Excellence in Corporate Governance at the University of Texas at Dallas, Dalton Cross Professor of Law at University of Texas at Austin Lino Graglia, and former University of California Regent, businessman and activist Ward Connerly discuss the state of race-based preferences in education and employment. Listen now, and don’t forget to subscribe to get updates for the Free To Choose Media Podcast.

Did Government Intervention and a World War End the Great Depression?

November 26th, 2025FreeToChooseNetwork0 Comments

In our last post, we explored how the Great Depression didn’t happen because capitalism failed, but because government intervention in monetary markets created distortions that made a necessary correction catastrophic. But the story doesn’t end with the 1929 crash. What followed reveals an even more important lesson about how government solutions can turn a temporary downturn into a decade-long disaster. Most of us learned in school that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs softened the Depression’s worst effects, and that World War II’s massive government spending finally ended the economic nightmare. It’s a comforting narrative that positions the government as the …

Steven Bartlett on the Real Game Entrepreneurs Play

November 21st, 2025FreeToChooseNetwork0 Comments

Every entrepreneur starts with the same delusion: success is about having great ideas and working hard. Steven Bartlett certainly did. At 18, dropping out of university after a single lecture to start his first company, he believed the game was about him—his vision, his effort, his brilliance. Ten years and countless mistakes later, the founder of Social Chain and host of “Diary of a CEO” discovered he’d been playing the wrong game entirely. “First-time founders have a hidden bias,” Bartlett explains in a recent interview you can watch below. “They think the game is about them.” But after building a …

Episode 254 – Has Affirmative Action Outlived Its Usefulness? (Podcast)

Today’s podcast is titled “Has Affirmative Action Outlived Its Usefulness?” Recorded in 1995, Dennis McCuistion, former Clinical Professor of Corporate Governance and Executive Director of the Institute for Excellence in Corporate Governance at the University of Texas at Dallas, nationally syndicated columnist and professor of economics Walter Williams, president of the University of Texas at Dallas and former president of Howard University Dr. Franklyn Jenifer, plus other guests, discuss whether affirmative action has outlived its usefulness and what should replace it. Listen now, and don’t forget to subscribe to get updates for the Free To Choose Media Podcast.

Did Capitalism Cause the Great Depression?

November 13th, 2025FreeToChooseNetwork0 Comments

Unfettered capitalism. That’s usually how the story goes. Greedy speculators run wild, markets spin out of control, and eventually the whole system collapses under the weight of its own excess. Then the government steps in heroically to clean up capitalism’s inevitable mess. It’s a tidy narrative that fits our intuitions about boom-and-bust cycles. But what if the real story is far more complicated? What if the Great Depression happened not because markets were too free, but because well-intentioned government policies created a web of distortions that made the eventual crash both inevitable and far worse than it needed to be? …

Episode 253 – Should America Build a Missile Defense System? (Podcast)

Today’s podcast is titled “Should America Build a Missile Defense System?” Recorded in 2001, Dennis McCuistion, former Clinical Professor of Corporate Governance and Executive Director of the Institute for Excellence in Corporate Governance at the University of Texas at Dallas, U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey, Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, Ivan Eland, Deputy Director of the Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers, Stephen Young, and former Director of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization and Chairman of High Frontier, Henry F. Cooper discuss whether the United States should build a national missile defense system. Listen now, and …