You’ve probably seen the headlines. Data center construction projects face protests and legal challenges from residents worried about noise, water usage, and property values. Social media platforms defend themselves in court against claims they’ve failed to protect teenagers from harmful content. Every major corporate expansion seems to trigger questions about environmental impact, community displacement, and social responsibility. And amid all this clamor, it’s a question that bears thinking about: What is the social responsibility of a business?  And of course, there’s a bare legal minimum that needs to be met. Was the property acquired through legal means? Is the marketing …

There’s a certain type of argument that surfaces whenever someone does well for themselves. You know the one. The successful business owner, the surgeon, the software engineer who took a risk on a startup that paid off. They’re making good money, maybe even great money, and someone inevitably steps forward to say: “Sure, but do they really need all that? Isn’t it a little greedy to keep so much when others have so little?” The framing is tidy. Almost intuitive. After all, if someone has more than they need and refuses to share, that sounds an awful lot like the …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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, …