There were two world-changing events stirring in the confused British politics of the 1760s and 1770s. One of them, led by Edmund Burke and the Founding Fathers and endlessly studied, ended in the American Revolution and a new and eventually powerful country. The other, simultaneous and much less studied, led to the Industrial Revolution, a […]

Government quality is not randomly distributed, but leptokurtic – good and bad trends tend to perpetuate themselves. In so doing, they resemble stock market and real estate malinvestment, as Austrian economists put it. It can probably be agreed by both political sides that since January 2001, the United States has endured more than two decades […]

We are constantly subjected to propaganda from media journalists living in tiny apartments in crime-ridden major cities about how wonderful those cities are. That is partly a matter of taste, of course. However, the technological and organizational changes brought by the COVID-19 pandemic may finally end city life for those for whom that pathological taste […]

This column has written fairly frequently about the blight of regulation, but it is always difficult to find concrete examples, while proving economic damage requires considering the counterfactual where the regulation did not exist. However, in my researches for “Forging Modernity,” a study of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, I have come across a modest-sized regulation whose […]