The Free To Choose Network Blog

Taxes Always Change Behavior

April 2nd, 2026FreeToChooseNetwork0 Comments

What would you do if you had a bigger budget? Maybe you really would have taken that vacation, upgraded your running shoes, or bought steak instead of ground beef if you’d had room in your budget to do it. But if you don’t, well, those options are removed. Individuals are constrained by the limits of their resources, full stop. Taxation tightens those constraints even further. As we mentioned in our last post, every tax changes behavior. When you tax something, you get less of it. Tax income, and people work less or find ways to shield their earnings. Tax investments, …

Episode 262 – Do Authoritarians Rule the World? – Part Two (Podcast)

Today’s podcast is titled “Do Authoritarians Rule the World? – Part Two” Recorded in 2023, 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, Barbara Kolm, Ph.D., Director, The Austrian Economics Center and President of the Friedrich August von Hayek Institute, and Robert Salinas Leon, Ph.D., Director, Center for Latin America at Atlas Network and President of the Mexico Business Forum continue their discussion about authoritarianism and autocracy and its real-world consequences and potential remedies, using case studies from Argentina, Russia, China, and …

Daniela Amodei on Self-Awareness: The Leadership Skill Nobody Teaches

March 20th, 2026FreeToChooseNetwork0 Comments

Every entrepreneur hits the same wall eventually: you realize you can’t be good at everything. You’re brilliant at product vision but terrible at operations. Or you’re a natural salesperson who freezes when looking at spreadsheets. The instinct is to fix your weaknesses, to become the complete founder who can do it all. Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic, spent 15 years learning the opposite lesson. In her conversation at Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, which you can watch below, she makes a case that most business advice ignores: knowing what you’re bad at matters more than trying to fix …

Taxes & Capitalism: The Necessary Compromise?

March 16th, 2026FreeToChooseNetwork0 Comments

You know the rules. Death and taxes—the two certainties of life, as the saying goes. Benjamin Franklin supposedly said it first, though the idea is older than that. And there’s a certain amount of truth in it. Taxes are everywhere. Here in the United States, we have taxes on income, taxes on spending, taxes on businesses, taxes on property. If we invest our money and it makes a return, that gets taxed, too. Certain items get taxed at higher rates than others. There are taxes on imports. And if we’ve managed to accrue a bit of property and savings to …

Episode 261 – Do Authoritarians Rule the World? – Part One (Podcast)

Today’s podcast is titled “Do Authoritarians Rule the World? – Part One.” Recorded in 2023, 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, speaks with Barbara Kolm, Ph.D., Director, The Austrian Economics Center and President of the Friedrich August von Hayek Institute, and Robert Salinas Leon, Ph.D., Director, Center for Latin America at Atlas Network and President of the Mexico Business Forum about the nature, rise, and consequences of authoritarianism and autocracy around the world, examined through a free-market, classical liberal lens. …

Episode 260 – China’s Overreach and Its Derailment (Podcast)

Today’s podcast is titled “China’s Overreach and Its Derailment.” Recorded in 2023, McCuistion program Perspectives Matter co-host Jim Falk interviews Susan Shirk, Ph.D., research professor, and chair of the 21st Century China Center at UCSD, and author of Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise, and David Firestein, President and CEO of The George H.W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations on the topic of America’s foreign policy relations with China and China’s domestic situation. Listen now, and don’t forget to subscribe to get updates for the Free To Choose Media Podcast.

Capitalism Means Nobody Does Everything Themselves

February 26th, 2026FreeToChooseNetwork0 Comments

Think about the last person you hired to do something you could have figured out on your own. Maybe a plumber. An accountant. Someone to handle your social media. At some point, you sat down, weighed how long it would take you to learn the thing, how long it would take you to do the thing, and how much it would cost you to just have someone who already knows what they’re doing handle it. And you hired them. Or maybe it wasn’t even that formalized. You simply understood that a certain task wasn’t worth your time to do yourself, …

Advait Sarkar on Why Smarter AI Might Be Making You a Worse Thinker

February 19th, 2026FreeToChooseNetwork0 Comments

You’ve probably noticed how easy it is to let AI handle the tedious tasks on your to-do list, from summarizing your emails and drafting your reports to analyzing your data. It feels like a productivity win. But Microsoft researcher Advait Sarkar has a provocative take on what that efficiency is actually costing you. Sarkar’s work at Microsoft Research focuses on how AI tools affect the way we think, and his findings should give every entrepreneur pause. When we offload cognitive work to AI, we might be saving time, but we’re losing practice. Research shows that people using AI assistants produce …

How Global Trade Makes Everyone Richer

February 13th, 2026FreeToChooseNetwork0 Comments

For most of human history, if you wanted something from far away, you had two options: Go find it yourself or take it from someone else who already did. Conquest was the preferred method. Armies marched, ships sailed, empires expanded, and people died—all because someone somewhere wanted resources they didn’t have at home. But over time, we figured out that you don’t actually need to conquer your neighbors to get what they have. You can just trade with them instead. It’s simpler, it’s easier, and it’s a lot less expensive. This shift from conquest to commerce represents one of the …

Episode 259 – Is Our Healthcare System Broken? (Podcast)

Today’s podcast is titled “Is Our Healthcare System Broken?” Recorded in 2022, McCuistion program Perspectives Matter co-host Vince Poscente leads a panel discussion about America’s healthcare system with Marianne Fazen, Ph.D., President & CEO of Texas Business Group on Health, Todd Furniss, author of The 60% Solution: Rethinking Health Care in the U.S., and Jim Holder, a partner at healthcare insurance consulting firm Holmes Murphy. Listen now, and don’t forget to subscribe to get updates for the Free To Choose Media Podcast.