The common wisdom among traditional money managers is that “beating the market’”will improve the lives of individual investors. For the sake of bureaucratic complexity, this “wisdom” includes alternative asset classes, active management, economic analysis, market forecasts and risk tolerance questionnaires. All of this presumes that analysts and strategists possess superior knowledge, and to prove it, they […]
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Jean-Baptiste Say, the Supply Side Economist Who Wrote the Textbook for Today’s Entrepreneur
Jean-Baptiste Say’s signature achievement, A Treatise on Political Economy, was first published in 1803. One notable aspect of this book is that its title combines two disciplines, economics and politics. And this makes sense if you consider that Say, besides being a gifted economist, was also a renowned philosopher and entrepreneur. And 200 years later, […]
Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer Painted Every Day Subjects While Opening the Universe to Humanity
The Declaration of Independence was signed and executed during an armed revolt against a despotic monarch. The document listed numerous transgressions by the King against the natural rights of his citizens, their collateral oppression, and the de facto forfeiture of sovereignty by the King. While the member States were to exercise self-government under the Articles of Confederation, that […]
Douglas Engelbart Bootstrapped Individual Production to Collective Knowledge
Legal justice is a system of laws, however subjective they can be, that punish vice. Poetic justice is a code of moral principles that rewards virtue and punishes vice. While some politicians are threatening the arbitrary use of government force during the Wuhan virus fiasco, and others are defending individual rights, no one is talking […]
John Bogle Asserts the Morality of Profits and Markets
Free market economics is a misunderstood phenomenon. As a dynamic system, it is complex and defies computer modeling. It is emergent, having both micro levels of individual human action and macro global trading systems. Accordingly, capitalism is not a contrived system. It is organic, and to understand it we must identify the essentials. In the […]
The Bourgeois Virtues of Poetic Justice Warrior Deirdre McCloskey
The Adventures of Superman was a syndicated television series that ran for six seasons. Running from 1952 – 1958, its opening catch phrase was Truth, Justice and the American Way. Because they are abstract concepts, they require critical thinking. Because they are virtues, they deserve concrete understanding. As social justice would have it, these virtues […]
Who is Kira Argounova? There’s No Time Like the Present to Find Out.
Petrograd smelt of carbolic acid is the sensory piercing, opening sentence of Ayn Rand’s 1936 novel, We the Living. Set in 1920’s Soviet Russia, the sentence describes Kira Argounova’s first impression upon her return to the city as an 18-year-old. More precisely, 1922 is the year Kira’s family returned to their home city from a […]
Arsonist Discovered During the Summer of Love at Capitalists’ Hillside Autonomous Zone (CHAZ)
On June 1st of year 39, an intrepid search party of one embarked on a mission. Its goal was to rescue a brilliant young man from the grips of his would-be captors. It turns out that her prey had taken refuge inside a newly established and barricaded cop-free enclave. Dagny Taggart was forced to crash their party and remain as an uninvited guest for 30 days. This begins Atlas Shrugged, Part III – titled “A is A.” Existence exists.
