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, …

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 …

Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter had a gift for memorable phrases. When he described capitalism’s relentless cycle of renewal as “creative destruction,” he captured something profound in just two words that initially seem to contradict each other. But there’s no contradiction. The term brilliantly encompasses both sides of innovation’s equation: the creation of something new and the destruction—or disruption, as we tend to say now—of what came before. And crucially, the order matters. Creation comes first. Destruction follows only when something better emerges to replace it. In our last post, we explored why innovation faces opposition and how it generates wealth …

“This time, it’s different.” You’ve probably heard some version of this lately. AI is going to eliminate jobs. Automation will make human workers obsolete. Unlike all those previous technological shifts, this one will actually leave people with nowhere to go. Except people have been saying “this time, it’s different” for centuries. And they’ve always been wrong. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder tells a remarkable story. A glassmaker came before Emperor Augustus with an invention—flexible glass that could be hammered back into shape after being dented or dropped. He demonstrated this “vitrum flexile” by throwing it on the floor before …

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 …

“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. …

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 …

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? …

“We need to break up Big Tech!” “These corporations are too powerful!” If you’ve followed political discourse over the past few years, you’ve heard variations of these complaints countless times. The underlying assumption is always the same: once a business gets big enough, it becomes permanently entrenched, immune to competition, and capable of exploiting consumers indefinitely. But what if this assumption is completely wrong? What if the natural tendency in free markets isn’t toward permanent monopolies but toward constant change, disruption, and renewal? What if the businesses that seem invincible today are actually more vulnerable than they appear? Let’s start …