Today’s podcast is titled “Can We Fix Our Immigration Policies?” Joining host Jim Falk are three immigration policy experts—David Bier, Associate Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute; Lora Ries, Director of the Heritage Foundation’s Border and Immigration Center; and Dany Bahar, Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Associate Professor at Brown University—to examine America’s immigration system, unchanged since 1986. Recorded in 2024, they debate whether the U.S. should expand legal immigration pathways as birth rates decline, how to address unauthorized border crossings, and whether America is losing its competitive edge in attracting skilled workers. Listen now, …
Does Capitalism Run on Greed?
Greed. The word carries a wealth (pun very much intended) of meaning with it. It’s considered to be one of the seven Deadly Sins. It’s the hungry, avaricious desire for more, particularly when you already have plenty. And it’s almost always used in a way that directs that impulse at material wealth. Money, most commonly. More than that, the word greed connotes a callous sort of selfishness that, at a minimum, disregards the wants and well-being of others or, more commonly, is outright hostile to them. It’s also a word we hear a lot these days. Aside from the Hollywood …
Episode 263 – Global Power in the Age of AI (Podcast)
Today’s podcast is titled “Global Power in the Age of AI.” Featuring Dr. Paul Scharre, Executive Vice President and Director of Studies at the Center for a New American Security and author of Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence about the US-China race for AI dominance, this episode from 2023 explores whether democracies can counter China’s long-term strategic thinking and the growing export of techno-authoritarian surveillance systems to over 80 countries worldwide. Join host Jim Falk, president emeritus of the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth and Dr.Scharre as they discuss technological advancements and its effects on …
Taxes Always Change Behavior
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
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?
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
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, …