A disturbing trend among true believers is to quip that “Bitcoin fixes this,” almost regardless of what the problem may be.
Joakim Book
Joakim Book is a writer, researcher and editor on all things money, finance and financial history. He holds a masters degree from the University of Oxford and has been a visiting scholar at the American Institute for Economic Research in 2018 and 2019. His works can be found at joakimbook.com and on the blog Life of an Econ Student.
Governments Don’t Have Magic Wands To Ward off Asymmetric Information
The kind of reasoning that underpins the tired old asymmetric information bogeyman in health care falls straight into the behavioral symmetry between market participants and policy makers that is a core contribution of modern public choice economics: it is not believable to submit that governments have magic wands.
Individual Freedom Works for COVID-19 Mitigation in Sweden
“Laissez-faire” Stockholm seems to fare better than locked-down New York.
Capitalism Did Not Fail; It Can Save Us
Riding out storms and sharing risks across billions of people is a feature, not a bug, and the affluent capitalist nature of our institutions puts us in a better position to deal with them.
Coronavirus Pandemic Is Not Exponential
Contrary to what almost everyone has said during the last three months – from media talking heads to presidents and epidemiologists and your neighbor – the growth of pandemics is not exponential. The number of people infected and number of dead don’t follow “exponential” curves. They follow S-shaped curves.
What Sweden Has Done Right on Coronavirus
Contrary to the U.S., where President Trump and Governor Cuomo and countless other political figures compete for the attention of their constituents and populace and underlings, the Swedish experience has been one of decentralized decision-makers and arms-length officials calling the shots.
Only The Rise of Capitalism Can Save The Brazilian Amazon Rainforests
Let poor countries grow rich, and in due course they will, too, look after their forests.
Capitalism and Free Markets Can Save Nature For Humankind
Instead of succumbing to the eternal alarmism that should undermine ecologists’ credibility, we should accept that maybe – just maybe – the world is getting better. And much-reviled capitalist markets are, in no small feat, to thank for that.
Climate Crusades and Green Finance
Who counts as green? Whose debt should be subsidized?
The Purpose of Flying A Nearly Empty Plane
An efficiency-minded environmentalist could object that this trip shouldn’t be made, a Marxist-leaning commentator that this was an example of the horrible waste and misallocation of the capitalist system.
Bitcoin: Best-Performing Asset of the Decade?
Bitcoin’s returns over the last decade have dominated every other asset we can compare it with, but that still doesn’t tell us what we need to know about the future viability of this extraordinary development in human monetary affairs.
Money and Liquidity
Perhaps the money of the future isn’t some sophisticated crypto token, but a private promise to consume a widely used service.
Economically Capitalism and Free-Markets Best “Distribute” The Wealth
Standing accused of all kinds of allegedly harmful things ranging from wealth inequality to privacy invasions, from voraciously destroying the Earth to indebting poor people, the idea of capitalism is in trouble.
Climate Activism: Doublethink and Cognitive Dissonance
What angers most people about climate alarmists is their doublethink, cognitive dissonance, and ability to rationalize their own behavior.
A Financial History of Edinburgh: The Rise and Fall of Scotland’s City of Money
By removing the market’s solution to collapsing banks, this unraveling forced electorate-sensitive governments to take up the residual risk and backstop the financial system that Scottish banks themselves so effectively regulated in the past.
“Hostile” Takeovers Aren’t Actually Hostile
A “hostile” corporate raider can only buy shares that others voluntarily sell.
Yield Curve Inversions Don’t Improve Investment Outcomes
Ronald Reagan once remarked that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Similarly, the financial economist Campbell Harvey recently wrote that the four most dangerous words, feared by central bankers...
Capitalism and Finance: In Defense of Share Buybacks
The confused objections to share buybacks illustrate the failure to look past the immediate effect and to understand what financial markets do.
Lessons From Free Banking in Scotland
Rothbard does not refute White’s thesis that Scottish banking was less regulated and hence more stable and well-functioning than England’s banking system in the same 145-year period.
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