Fifteen hundred of the participants in the January 6, 2021 demonstration at the U.S. Capitol, almost all of them non-violent, were imprisoned through a disturbing use of modern surveillance technology. Twenty years earlier, no such universal punishment would have been possible, even had the government, then far less authoritarian, wanted to impose it. Numerous people […]

Editor’s Note: The Bear’s Lair is happily continuing for the foreseeable future as we were never dependent on USAID funding. Our sincerest condolences to our suddenly impoverished fellow writers. President Trump has had a very successful first few weeks in office, issuing a blizzard of Executive Orders that not only reversed much of the damage […]

Just as Oscar Wilde said it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell, so one cannot help giggling that a Chinese inventor with a small team and modest resources has by his open source DeepSeek AI system outsmarted the behemoth “geniuses” that came up with the $500 […]

Western civilization has declined a long way since its 1991 triumph with the fall of most of Communism. The hard left bears little responsibility for this decline; they have had only a modest share of power. Even the center-left does not bear all the responsibility, their tenure has included some decent governments such as that […]

This column has written several times on recommended policies for President Donald J. Trump, who will be inaugurated today. However, Trump is erratic, and the people around him are often more so. Not only do we need good policies over the next four years, but we must avoid some superficially attractive bad ones, some of […]

The Trump Presidency will be a race between two gigantic opposing forces. On the one hand, the lunatic asset prices that now prevail, both in stocks and real estate, have a very long way to fall – in the Austrian economic sense, there is a gigantic amount of malinvestment that must be liquidated. This fall […]

H1B visas are not slavery. However, they place their recipients in an inferior, immobile tier of the labor force that by preventing them from moving freely between employers, allows employers to exploit them at wages below the U.S. market level. In this respect, they serve the same economic function as antebellum slavery, providing a non-market […]

Emerging markets were huge beneficiaries of the fall of Communism and the globalization trend that followed it in 1991-2008. Since then, the story has been much darker for poor countries in all regions of the world, with many “emerging markets” ceasing to emerge and relapsing back into long-term poverty. With President Trump’s advent, more protectionism […]

The European Union was always a somewhat anti-free-market association, one reason why the then more liberal United Kingdom should not have joined it. In recent years, however, it has gone beyond the mild social democracy baked into its constitutional arrangements, and has become more authoritarian, more oriented towards central planning through its regulations, and recently […]

The Biden Administration has generally been startling in its lack of originality on economic policy, with one exception: Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan. Khan has reversed the FTC’s long-standing positive attitude to mergers and acquisitions, taking a highly skeptical attitude to them, based partly on her own anti-capitalist ideology. While the incoming Trump administration […]