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AI may benefit ordinary people more than its critics assume. Comment “Artificial” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. Wealthy people have always been able to hire assistants, researchers, tutors, chefs, and specialists. AI increasingly gives ordinary people access to capabilities that once required money, connections, or specialized expertise. That does not mean every use of AI is beneficial or every risk is imaginary. But widespread voluntary adoption tells us something important: millions of people believe these tools improve their lives. Milton Friedman, Henry Hazlitt, and Matt Ridley each emphasized a broader lesson about technology: innovation raises living standards by expanding what ordinary people can do. The challenge is to preserve competition and experimentation while addressing concrete harms, rather than freezing a rapidly evolving technology through premature regulation.

Free-market capitalism has created extraordinary material progress because it gives people room to produce, exchange, invest, and build. Comment “Capitalism” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. When property rights are secure, contracts are protected, trade is open, and starting a business is relatively easy, resources can move toward the uses people value most. Prices communicate scarcity. Profits reward successful service. Losses push resources away from waste. The result is more than economic efficiency. Open markets expand the range of goods and services available, create opportunities for entrepreneurship and work, and make it easier for individuals to pursue their own goals. Prosperity ultimately means greater freedom to choose, create, learn, travel, care for others, and build a fuller life.

High prices are often symptoms of policies that restrict supply and weaken competition. Comment “Expensive” and we’ll send you an article about the subject. When governments make it harder to build homes, open businesses, or provide services, fewer suppliers can meet consumer demand. The result is higher prices. In Oklahoma, for example, housing prices have risen 55 percent since 2020. Experts argue that faster permitting, smaller lots, and more flexible zoning could expand housing supply and improve affordability. Government spending can also fail to make essential services cheaper. Despite substantial state funding, college costs continue to rise, while Oklahoma’s per-capita healthcare spending increased 220 percent between 2000 and 2024, far faster than personal income. Instead of expanding government intervention, policymakers should remove barriers to entry and let competition increase supply and put downward pressure on prices.

More healthcare spending does not automatically mean better health. Comment “Healthcare” and we’ll send you the full video. The RAND Health Insurance Experiment randomly assigned thousands of Americans to plans ranging from free care to substantial cost sharing. People with free or nearly free care used significantly more medical services. But for the average participant, that extra care produced little improvement across broad measures of health, although some poorer and sicker patients benefited. The lesson is important: when patients face no price at the point of care, utilization rises sharply, but additional spending may deliver diminishing returns. Insurance is valuable, especially against catastrophic expenses. Yet a system that insulates every routine decision from prices can encourage more consumption without producing proportionally better outcomes.

Ayn Rand saw the businessman as a symbol of something larger than commerce: a society where people can create, invest, trade, and build without political permission. Comment “Rand” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. Workers, scientists, professionals, and soldiers can exist under authoritarian regimes, although often under coercion and severe restrictions. Independent entrepreneurs are different. They require property rights, contracts, freedom of association, and enough political restraint to make long-term plans. When those freedoms disappear, business becomes dependent on bureaucratic approval, political connections, or outright state control. That is why entrepreneurship can reveal something important about a society’s institutions. Where independent businesses can emerge, compete, fail, and succeed without serving political masters, economic freedom has real space to exist.

Production is more than the mechanical combination of labor, land, and capital. In its deepest economic sense, production is the creation of value. Comment “Production” and we’ll send you an article exploring this idea. As the classical economist Jean-Baptiste Say understood, consumer valuations ultimately drive economic activity in a market economy. We produce because we seek to satisfy human wants. Entrepreneurs create wealth by redirecting scarce resources from lesser-valued uses toward goods and services that consumers value more. Producing mountains of goods that nobody wants accomplishes nothing. Actually, producing things of negative value, or things that nobody wants, has a more precise name: destruction. Say also emphasized a fundamental economic truth: before we can consume, something must be produced. This insight is often overlooked in debates about economic stimulus. John Maynard Keynes argued that insufficient aggregate demand could leave productive resources idle and that government spending could help revive economic activity. Yet stimulating expenditure cannot, by itself, guarantee lasting prosperity. Even when additional spending helps bring idle resources back into production, sustained improvements in living standards require capital accumulation, innovation, and the creation of goods and services that satisfy consumers. Wealth is ultimately measured by what we can enjoy, not by how much we can spend. A prosperous society must first create the value it hopes to consume.

The biggest problem with US health insurance is that it distorts prices. Comment “Healthcare” and we’ll send you the full video. An Oregon Medicaid experiment found that expanding coverage improved financial protection and access to care, but after two years produced no statistically significant improvement in several measured physical health outcomes. That should make us think carefully about what insurance is for. When routine services are prepaid through insurance, patients see fewer prices and have less reason to compare options. At the same time, regulations can restrict what providers are allowed to offer. Better healthcare requires less distorted prices, more consumer choice, and fewer barriers to supply.

Capitalism should not be blamed for privileges created by government. Comment “Capitalism” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. Free-market capitalism rests on private property, voluntary exchange, competition, and open entry. Businesses succeed by persuading consumers to buy from them. Cronyism works differently. Subsidies, bailouts, protective tariffs, special tax treatment, and regulations that block competitors allow firms to pursue politicians instead of customers. Being pro-market therefore does not mean defending every corporation. It means defending competition and opposing political favoritism. When a company succeeds because consumers freely reward it, that is capitalism. When it succeeds because government gives it special advantages, that is cronyism.

Wall Street makes an easy villain in the housing crisis. But the real culprit lurks in the shadows of government regulation. Comment “Housing” and we’ll send you a video that explores the topic further. In many of America’s most expensive cities, high prices signal strong demand for new construction. Yet zoning restrictions, permitting delays, and neighborhood opposition make it difficult to respond. That helps explain why cities like Atlanta, Austin, and Phoenix have often attracted more new construction relative to demand than places where building is heavily constrained. Expensive housing reflects scarcity. Investors may respond to that scarcity, but regulation often prevents them from solving it.

France’s economic troubles run deeper than the rising cost of living. High public spending, mounting debt, and a rigid labor market are putting increasing pressure on its economy. Comment “France” and we’ll send you an article that explores this topic further. Public spending in France reached 57.3% of GDP in 2025; its public social spending exceeds 30% of GDP, and its tax burden is the OECD’s second highest. Its pension obligations, segmented labor market, and mounting public debt suggest a different diagnosis. France’s challenges are rooted in a state whose commitments have grown harder to finance, not in a retreat from government intervention.

During World War II, the US government imposed wage controls to contain inflation. With labor increasingly scarce, employers struggled to attract workers because they couldn’t freely raise wages. They found a workaround: offering additional compensation through fringe benefits, particularly health insurance. Comment “Healthcare” and we’ll send you the full video. In 1943, the National War Labor Board ruled that employer contributions to health insurance wouldn’t count as wages subject to government controls. Moreover, employer-paid health insurance premiums were generally excluded from employees’ taxable income, making them more attractive than equivalent wage increases. These incentives encouraged the expansion of employer-sponsored health insurance. The arrangement survived the war, and Congress formally codified its favorable tax treatment in 1954, helping institutionalize America’s employment-based health insurance system.

Free-market capitalism motivates you to serve others on their own terms; an economy based on redistribution motivates you to use others to serve your own ends against their will. Comment “Capitalism” and we’ll send you an article that explores this topic further. Free markets align your self-interest with how successful you are at perceiving and satisfying the demands of strangers. To the extent that your efforts are aimed at satisfying the most urgently valued needs of consumers, employers, or associates, you’re likely to end up commanding a larger share of resources. Collectivist economies, despite supposedly advancing society’s interests, tend to fragment and unravel the social order. When government distribution becomes a privileged means of survival and prosperity, you’re incentivized to care less about satisfying others’ needs and more about securing a larger share of the resources distributed by the government, often at the expense of your fellows. In other words, capitalism creates mutual gains; redistribution creates gains for some at the expense of others.

Why is Michael Woodford’s “New Keynesian” model so different from old Keynesianism? Comment “Macroeconomics” and we’ll send you an article on the ideas that reshaped modern macroeconomic policy. In Part II of our series on the 2026 Nobel Prize in Economics, we look at Michael Woodford, whose work helped build the canonical New Keynesian model and transformed how economists think about monetary policy, expectations, and macroeconomic stabilization. Despite the name, Woodford’s framework is better understood as a continuation of the intellectual revolution associated with Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas than as a return to Keynes’s original macroeconomic vision. What Woodford retains from Keynes is mainly the idea that prices and wages can be sticky. Everything else is rebuilt around forward-looking behavior, rational expectations, optimization, general equilibrium, and explicit rules for monetary policy. Woodford’s achievement was to show how monetary policy could be analyzed with the discipline of modern microeconomics rather than the ad hoc relationships that characterized much of Old Keynesianism.

Europe wants technological sovereignty. But protectionism may leave it paying more for less. Comment “Tech” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. The EU’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act would restrict foreign providers in critical sectors, potentially forcing firms like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to offer separate, more limited services. The problem is that Europe still lacks alternatives at the same scale and quality. Blocking competitors does not create innovation. It raises costs, reduces choice, and can hit smaller businesses hardest. Technological strength comes from attracting investment, encouraging competition, and allowing consumers and firms to choose the best tools available. Sovereignty built by closing markets risks becoming technological isolation.

Rushing to regulate AI out of every hypothetical danger may create real ones. Comment “Regulation” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. Fraud, negligence, discrimination, deceptive claims, identity theft, and price-fixing are already illegal, whether AI is involved or not. Existing law can often address actual harms as they emerge. Premature regulation can freeze bad assumptions into law, raise barriers for startups, and protect large firms that can absorb compliance costs. A better approach begins with experience: identify concrete harms, test whether current law can handle them, and legislate only where genuine gaps appear.

Housing subsidies become far more expensive when government refuses to let housing supply grow. Comment “Housing” and we’ll send you the full video. Federal rental assistance often requires tenants to pay about 30% of their income while taxpayers cover the rest. That means every regulation that pushes market rents higher also increases the government’s bill. The result is a costly contradiction: Washington spends tens of billions of dollars on rental aid while zoning, permitting rules, and other restrictions keep housing scarce and expensive. Even then, assistance reaches only a fraction of eligible households, leaving millions waiting.

What did Robert Hall change about modern macroeconomics? Comment “Flat Taxes” and we’ll send you an article on a topic Robert Hall has studied and advocated extensively. In Part I of our series on the 2026 Nobel Prize in Economics, we look at Robert Hall, one of 2026’s Nobel laureates in Economics, whose work helped transform how economists think about consumption, expectations, and fiscal stimulus. Building on ideas associated with Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas, Hall found evidence that households smooth consumption over time and respond to expected lifetime resources, not simply current income. Hall also became a prominent advocate of a flat tax designed to simplify taxation and reduce penalties on saving and investment. Stay tuned for Part II, where we’ll look at Michael Woodford’s contributions to modern macroeconomics.

A tariff born from a 1960s dispute over chicken still makes American trucks more expensive today. Comment “Trucks” and we’ll send you the full video. The United States imposed a 25% tariff on imported light trucks after Europe restricted American chicken. Europe eventually removed its chicken tariffs, but America kept the truck tax. That protection raises the price of imported trucks and shields domestic producers from foreign competition, giving them more room to charge higher prices too. Add tariffs on steel and aluminum, plus regulations that distort what automakers produce, and transportation becomes even more expensive. Trade barriers rarely stay confined to politicians. Consumers ultimately pay for them.

Thomas Sowell understood that consumers are often protected most effectively when businesses must compete for their money. Comment “Sowell” and we’ll send you an article that explores his ideas further. Competition gives consumers something regulation often cannot: alternatives. A firm that charges too much, provides poor service, or ignores customers creates an opportunity for rivals to win their business. Profits reward companies that satisfy people efficiently, while losses punish those that waste resources or fail to adapt. Government regulators face different incentives. They can make mistakes without losing customers, and regulations intended to protect consumers can sometimes raise barriers to entry and shield established firms from competition. Consumer protection therefore depends greatly on preserving choice. When entrepreneurs remain free to enter markets and challenge incumbents, businesses must continually earn the loyalty of the people they serve.

Marxist ideas can only beget chaos, not positive social change. Comment “Marx” and we’ll send you an article about the subject. Wanting to change society is not evidence that one understands how it works. Marxism reduces capitalism to class, exploitation, and conflict while overlooking how markets and profits really operate. Beneficial social change emerges, not from Marxist-inspired revolutions, but from peaceful interaction, from individuals freely coordinating without anyone directing the whole system.

No matter how advanced AI becomes, economic coordination requires more than computing power. Comment “Markets” and we’ll send you an article about the topic. Economies depend on dispersed knowledge, changing preferences, and opportunities that emerge through human interaction. Much of this knowledge is tacit and cannot simply be entered into a machine. Markets allow people to discover information, adjust their plans, and coordinate their activities through voluntary exchange. AI can process enormous amounts of data, but innovation and entrepreneurship continually create possibilities that history alone cannot predict. Markets remain indispensable because they are dynamic processes of discovery, not merely mathematical problems waiting for a powerful enough computer.

Data centers are essential to modern life, storing everything from personal photos and emails to humanity’s growing digital knowledge. Comment “Data centers” and we’ll send you an article that explores the topic in detail. Although concerns about their electricity and water consumption deserve attention, their environmental and economic costs are often exaggerated. The real challenge is choosing suitable locations and holding companies accountable for their promises. Projects that deceive communities or strain scarce resources demonstrate what happens when businesses act irresponsibly or build in unsuitable areas. By contrast, well-planned data centers can generate tax revenue, fund public infrastructure, create economic opportunities, and limit costs for local households. As AI becomes more efficient, demand for computing and data storage will likely continue growing. The solution is not to oppose data centers, but to encourage responsible development, technological innovation, transparency, and careful location choices.

Milton Friedman understood that the way we spend money changes our incentives. Comment “Friedman” and we’ll send you an article on the topic. When we spend our own money on ourselves, we care about both price and quality. When we spend someone else’s money on ourselves, the pressure to economize weakens. And when we spend someone else’s money on someone else, both disciplines largely disappear. That final case resembles much government spending. Public officials allocate resources they did not personally earn to beneficiaries whose preferences they may only imperfectly understand. Even with good intentions, the incentives to minimize costs and maximize value are weaker than in voluntary exchange. This helps explain why public programs can become expensive, wasteful, and resistant to correction.

Daron Acemoglu thinks AI-driven unemployment could triple over the next decade. Comment “Unemployment” and we’ll send you a YouTube video that explores the topic in further detail. AI may replace many tasks without replacing entire jobs. Past technological revolutions ultimately raised wages and expanded employment. AI may follow a different path, but the lesson remains: economies adapt in ways that experts, even Nobel Prize winners, fail to foresee.

You can’t have your cheap burger and a higher minimum wage too. Comment “Wages” and we’ll send you an article about this topic. Fast-food chains are particularly sensitive to minimum-wage increases. When the minimum wage rises, restaurants have to adjust to higher labor costs. They can do so along different margins: hire fewer workers, reduce employee benefits, cut hours, or charge customers more. Because fast-food restaurants operate in a highly competitive industry with relatively thin margins, higher costs are often passed on to consumers. Burger eaters are among the many people who bear the cost. But the effects go beyond price increases. As restaurants respond to more expensive labor, they have stronger incentives to automate their processes, invest in labor-saving technologies, reorganize production, or even reduce the pace at which they expand and hire. Some workers may benefit from higher wages, but those gains come with costs borne by consumers and by the workers who are never hired, whose hours are cut, or whose jobs are eventually automated away. These effects are much harder to see. In the long run, effectively “taxing” low-wage employment this way can make entry-level work scarcer while raising the cost of the goods those workers themselves consume.

Trade creates a web of mutual dependence that strengthens rather than weakens our ability to prosper. Comment “Bastiat” and we’ll send you an article about this brilliant economist. Every voluntary exchange connects people who possess different resources, skills, knowledge, and preferences. Each participant gives something they value less in exchange for something they value more, creating gains on both sides. This reciprocity is essential: when we rely on others for goods and services, they also rely on us as customers, employers, suppliers, or partners. Our interests become connected through countless peaceful transactions. Far from making societies fragile, this interdependence encourages cooperation, specialization, innovation, and trust. The deeper the network of exchange, the more opportunities people have to improve their circumstances by serving one another. Commerce therefore transforms individual differences into a source of shared prosperity, allowing people to benefit from what others can produce better, faster, or more efficiently.

What does the Fed’s latest rate hike change? Comment “Fed” and tell us how interest rates affect your plans. On September 16, the Federal Reserve raised its target range by 25 basis points to 3.75–4.00%, citing elevated inflation and resilient spending. Rate changes influence credit, saving, business investment, and asset prices, often before households experience their full effects. Because expectations also move markets, uncertainty about future decisions can complicate planning. Some economists favor competitive monetary arrangements; with a central bank in place, they argue that predictable rules can constrain discretion and political pressure.

Socialism fails because planners cannot replace the information created by markets. Comment “Socialism” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. Prices emerge from millions of voluntary exchanges and communicate changing information about scarcity, preferences, costs, and opportunities. When socialism abolishes private property in capital goods, those goods are no longer exchanged among competing owners. Without genuine market exchanges, meaningful prices cannot emerge, and planners lose the signals needed to compare alternative uses of scarce resources. More computing power cannot solve this problem. The relevant knowledge is dispersed, subjective, and often discovered only through exchange itself. Markets coordinate because property, prices, profit, and loss allow constant experimentation and correction.

Criticizing capitalism is easy when capitalism is defined by its critics. Comment “Capitalism” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. Too many debates begin by attributing positions to thinkers like Hayek and Friedman that they did not actually hold, then judging markets against those caricatures. A better test is empirical. Marx predicted worsening conditions for workers, longer working hours, and growing exploitation. Yet economic history shows rising living standards, dramatic declines in working hours, and broad gains for workers across market economies. Capitalism should be criticized where criticism is deserved. But serious criticism requires understanding what its defenders actually argue and testing competing theories against evidence. Economic ideas should survive because their predictions hold up, not because their accusations are repeated often enough.

The reasons for regulating AI are far weaker than one could expect. Comment “Regulation” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. Warnings about mass job displacement, collapsing entry-level employment, or an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution are still mostly forecasts. So far, the effects of AI are much harder to see in productivity and labor-market data than in headlines. That matters because regulation also has costs. Rules designed around hypothetical harms can protect incumbents, raise barriers to entry, and slow experimentation before we even understand the technology’s real effects. Markets adapt through trial, competition, and learning. Policymakers should respond to demonstrated harms, not regulate first and search for evidence later.

Ludwig von Mises was a superb economist. Here are three indispensable works of Mises, who was born on September 29, 145 years ago! Comment “Mises” and tell us which you’d read first. In The Theory of Money and Credit, Ludwig von Mises connected money to individual valuation and examined credit expansion. His 1920 essay on socialist calculation argued that without market prices for capital goods, planners cannot compare production plans through monetary calculation. Human Action then developed his wider economic system from purposeful human choice. Together, these works connect money, ownership, prices, and economic coordination, and continue to inform debates about the market process and central planning.

A country can be rich in natural resources and still be poor in opportunities. Comment “Thatcher” and we’ll send you an article that explores her ideas further. Oil, minerals, and fertile land can be valuable, but they do not automatically create prosperity. What matters enormously is the institutional environment in which people use them. When property rights are secure, contracts are enforced, and rules remain predictable, individuals have stronger incentives to save, invest, innovate, and build businesses. Entrepreneurs can take risks knowing that the rewards of their efforts will not be arbitrarily confiscated. Margaret Thatcher understood this distinction. She argued that a nation’s economic strength rests on human enterprise and the institutions that allow it to flourish, rather than its natural endowments alone. Countries with few natural resources can achieve remarkable prosperity by allowing people to develop their talents, exchange freely, and combine their productive efforts.

Innovation is inherently rebellious. Entrepreneurs and creators are the rebels who shaped the modern world. Comment “Innovation” and we’ll send you an article on the topic. The Industrial Revolution ushered in a new era of continuous innovation and mold-breaking. Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises took note of the unprecedented change in attitudes toward innovation that emerged during the golden era of classical liberalism. The nineteenth century was the century of free trade, experiments with limited government, and the loosening of guilds’ power over workers, producers, and middlemen. However brief this golden era was, Mises showed how it changed the world forever. Individuals were no longer subject to rigid schemes imposed from above, unable to pursue paths of their own. They were no longer involuntary followers of tradition, bound to blindly obey established customs. They were free to create, experiment, innovate, and rebel against established doctrines and practices. Capitalism rewarded those who satisfied the pressing needs of the masses, rather than those who served the interests of elites and oligarchs.

People are having fewer children. Why should we care? Comment “Fertility” and we’ll send you an article on the topic. Falling fertility means more than smaller families. Over time, it can mean fewer workers, entrepreneurs, scientists, and taxpayers, while pensions, healthcare systems, and infrastructure must be supported by a shrinking population. That does not make decline inevitable. Technology, automation, and AI can raise productivity and help societies do more with fewer workers. But institutions will matter enormously. A smaller, older population will need open markets, strong property rights, innovation, and entrepreneurship more than ever to adapt, invest, and continue creating prosperity.

America’s healthcare system is often blamed on “the free market,” but much of it is shaped by government policy. Comment “Healthcare” and we’ll send you the full video. Tax rules favor employer-sponsored insurance, subsidies insulate consumers from prices, licensing limits who can provide care, and certificate-of-need laws can restrict new facilities. These interventions weaken competition and make prices harder to see. Markets work best when consumers can compare options, providers can enter, and prices carry information. Many healthcare problems reflect a system where government rules shape who pays, who provides, and what choices remain.

If more efficient tires save drivers money, why make them mandatory? Comment “Tires” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. Beginning in 2029, California will require replacement tires to meet new efficiency standards. Regulators project substantial fuel savings, with relatively small increases in purchase prices. But every driver faces different circumstances. Mileage, budget, road conditions, comfort, durability, and immediate expenses all influence purchasing decisions. A driver struggling to pay this month’s bills may value a cheaper set of tires today more than potential fuel savings years later. F.A. Hayek explained why this matters: individuals possess knowledge of their circumstances that regulators cannot fully collect. The debate raises a fundamental question about consumer choice: could better information encourage efficiency without restricting the alternatives available to drivers?

Why have home prices soared when construction costs haven’t risen nearly as much? Comment “Housing” and we’ll send you the full video. Economists Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko uncovered something revealing: between 1980 and 2015, the inflation-adjusted physical cost of building a square foot of housing remained remarkably stable. Yet home prices in many desirable American cities rose dramatically. What explains the gap? Part of the answer lies in restrictions that prevent housing supply from responding to demand. Zoning laws, height limits, parking mandates, lengthy permitting processes, and neighborhood opposition make it increasingly difficult to build where people want to live. When developers cannot add enough homes, rising demand translates into higher prices instead of more construction.

What if a trusted source gets capitalism wrong? Comment “Capitalism” and we’ll send you an article that discusses the topic in more detail. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is one of academia’s most respected reference works. That makes its recent entry on capitalism especially disappointing. Political scientist Chiara Cordelli presents contested interpretations as settled descriptions, while giving little attention to objections from economists and economic historians. Economist Vincent Geloso argues that critics should first represent opposing ideas accurately before attacking them.

Can government-owned grocery stores really make food dramatically cheaper? Comment “Groceries” and we’ll send you the full video. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan calls for five city-owned grocery stores, with the promise of significantly lower prices on everyday staples. But there is an important economic question hiding behind that promise. Grocery retail is already a low-margin business. If private supermarkets typically keep only a small percentage of sales as profit, simply removing “corporate profit” cannot generate enormous price reductions by itself. A municipal store could still charge much less at checkout. But the difference would have to come from somewhere: cheaper facilities, greater purchasing efficiency, taxpayer subsidies, or losses absorbed outside the store’s posted prices.

Ayn Rand saw capitalism as more than an economic system. For her, its defining principle was the freedom to say yes or no. Comment “Rand” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. In a market economy, cooperation depends largely on consent. An employer must persuade someone to work for an offered wage. A business must persuade consumers to buy. An investor can refuse a project. A worker can seek another employer. Buyers and sellers can walk away from exchanges that do not serve their interests. That freedom matters because voluntary exchange leaves room for disagreement. People do not need to share the same values, politics, religion, or vision of the good life to cooperate. They only need to agree on the terms of a particular exchange. Rand’s defense of capitalism rested heavily on this principle: individuals should be free to pursue their own purposes and associate with others by mutual consent. Markets transform that freedom into cooperation among people who may otherwise have almost nothing in common.

PISA 2025 should worry anyone who cares about prosperity. Comment “Human Capital” and we’ll send you an article on why skills matter for prosperity. Across much of the developed world, reading and mathematics performance has continued to deteriorate, even after decades of expanding educational resources. Education is not valuable merely for the credential it produces: it builds human capital, the stock of knowledge and skills that makes people more productive and economies more capable of growing. It is tempting to blame phones, social media, or the pandemic, and each may matter. But the deeper question is institutional. If existing education systems struggle to adapt, the answer shouldn’t automatically be more spending or more technological repression. We should be asking how competition, experimentation, entrepreneurship, and parental choice can help education discover better ways to teach.

Thomas Sowell challenges one of the most persistent economic myths: the idea that the rich become rich by making everyone else poorer. Comment “Wealth” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. That way of thinking treats wealth as a fixed pie. If someone gets a larger slice, someone else must necessarily receive less. But market economies do not work that way. Entrepreneurs can become extremely wealthy by creating products, technologies, services, and businesses that raise living standards for millions of other people. Their fortunes may grow at the same time that ordinary households gain access to better food, transportation, medicine, communication, entertainment, and housing. Sowell’s point is simple: if billionaires caused poverty merely by existing, societies with more billionaires should systematically have poorer populations. The more useful question is how wealth is created in the first place. Economic progress comes from producing more value, raising productivity, investing capital, and discovering better ways to satisfy human wants.

AI may change education less by replacing learning than by forcing us to ask what is actually worth learning. Comment “Learning” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. A chatbot can now walk a student through problems that once required a teacher, a manual, or hours of trial and error. But easier access to answers also raises harder questions. Which skills should students master without assistance? When does struggle build understanding? Which tasks are valuable precisely because they take time? And when is using AI simply another form of specialization, like using a calculator instead of doing every calculation by hand? If students can outsource more routine work, schools should spend less energy policing every shortcut and more energy identifying the knowledge, judgment, curiosity, and perseverance that remain worth cultivating.

Adam Smith’s ideas changed the world. Now they’re getting a graphic novel treatment. Comment “Wealth of Nations” and we’ll send you a link to download your own digital copy or purchase a hard copy! To mark the 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations, Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute has reimagined the foundations of economics in a visual format, making concepts like the invisible hand, the division of labor, free trade, and specialization engaging and accessible for a new generation of readers. Smith helped explain how prosperity can emerge from millions of ordinary people pursuing their own goals, exchanging voluntarily, and responding to prices and incentives. His work challenged the mercantilist belief that governments create wealth by controlling trade and accumulating treasure. Two and a half centuries later, those ideas remain essential for understanding how markets coordinate human activity, encourage cooperation among strangers, and turn specialization into rising living standards. Now, they can be explored in an entirely new format.

AI is developing at breakneck speed. Should we stop it? Comment “Artificial Intelligence” and we’ll send you a video on the economics of AI. On September 8, OpenAI announced that an internal AI system had produced a solution to the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of mathematics’ Millennium Prize Problems. That same day, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation on X, warning that leading labs were racing toward self-improving systems that could become catastrophically dangerous. One story displayed AI’s growing capabilities; the other transformed those capabilities into a reason for fear. As AI grows more capable, anxiety about jobs, learning, safety, and control grows with it. But fear can also shape policy. Adam Smith gives us reason to ask who benefits from the rules proposed in response, while economists Schumpeter and Julian Simon give us reason to view today’s disruptions in a longer historical perspective.

Economist Mark Perry’s “Chart of the Century” tells a striking story about prices. Comment “Prices” and we’ll send you a video on the topic. Over the past several decades, many goods largely produced in competitive markets, from televisions and software to household appliances and communication services, have become dramatically better and more affordable. Meanwhile, sectors where government financing, subsidies, licensing, and regulation play a much larger role, especially healthcare and higher education, have experienced some of the steepest price increases. The pattern raises a question worth asking: what happens when consumers are insulated from prices and providers become accustomed to subsidies, guaranteed financing, and limited competition? Competition forces businesses to economize. Profits reward serving consumers efficiently, while losses expose waste. Government programs can weaken those disciplines, allowing costs and administrative layers to grow without the same pressure to deliver more for less.

Value begins in the human mind. Comment “Menger” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. Carl Menger and the Austrian economists helped transform economics by showing that goods do not carry value as an objective property stamped into them by labor, cost, or material substance. A bottle of water, a diamond, a book, or a tool becomes valuable because someone, facing real needs and limited means, judges it useful for a particular purpose. Markets are built on millions of subjective valuations. Buyers and sellers exchange because they rank goods differently. Prices emerge from those encounters, condensing dispersed judgments about usefulness, scarcity, urgency, and alternatives. The seller gives up something he values less than what he receives. The buyer does the same. No central planner needs to decide what things “should” be worth. A free market lets people reveal value through choice.

Hopping on the ’80s trend, but Milton Friedman was actually spending the decade bringing free-market ideas to millions through Free to Choose, advising Reagan, and making the case for lower taxes, less regulation, and limited government. We just wanted to see him in a colorful outfit. The ’80s trend, except Margaret Thatcher was actually there. Running Britain. Privatizing industries. Cutting taxes. Taking on the unions. Hopping on the ’80s trend, but Frédéric Bastiat was actually spending his time making the case for free trade, limited government, and individual liberty—and showing how government policies can create costs we don’t always see. He definitely missed the ’80s. We just wanted to see the outfit. Hopping on the ’80s trend, but Ayn Rand was actually spending her final years defending individualism, capitalism, and Objectivism through her writing, interviews, and lectures. We’ll admit it: we mostly wanted to see the ’80s look. Ludwig von Mises didn’t make it to the ’80s. His ideas did. Free markets. Sound money. Entrepreneurship. A relentless critique of central planning. The decade caught up with the ideas. We took care of the wardrobe. While everyone’s going back to the ’80s, Friedrich Hayek never had to. Writing. Lecturing. Warning about central planning. Watching free-market ideas move from the margins into the mainstream. The ideas were serious. The outfit didn’t have to be. Hopping on the ’80s trend, but Adam Smith was actually spending his time in 18th-century Scotland writing The Wealth of Nations, shaping the foundations of modern economics, and explaining the importance of markets, trade, and specialization.

Panic over AI can make us forget how innovation actually works. Comment “Innovation” and we’ll send you the full video. In a recent X thread, Jacob Coxon said he resigned from Anthropic after doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. His claim was stark: leading labs are racing toward self-improving superintelligence and taking risks that could affect everyone. But authors like Matt Ridley reminds us that nobody sees a new technology clearly at the beginning. Electricity, cars, computers, the internet, and now AI arrive through surprise, error, hype, disappointment, rivalry, and unexpected uses. We often overestimate what technology will do tomorrow and underestimate what it may do over decades. Enter economic historian Joel Mokyr. Mokyr helps explain why some societies handle this process better than others. Innovation flourishes where culture welcomes useful knowledge, experimenters are allowed to challenge old habits, and institutions protect people trying new things. The turbulence is painful, but it is also how societies escape stagnation. AI will rearrange work. It will create failures and dangers. It will also create tools, companies, jobs, and possibilities we cannot yet name. The right answer is accountability, experimentation, open markets, and humility about the future.

There’s invisible coordination behind the things we buy. Comment “I, Trader” and we’ll send you the essay. Twenty-five years after 9/11, economist Peter C. Earle reflects on why the World Trade Center was such a powerful symbol of global commerce. Inside those towers, traders, brokers, bankers, insurers, analysts, and countless others helped coordinate the movement of goods, capital, information, and risk across the world. That observation leads Earle back to Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil.” A pencil requires cedar, graphite, brass, lacquer, labor, machinery, and transport. But those inputs must also find the right buyers, prices, places, and moments. Traders, arbitrageurs, warehouse operators, insurers, speculators, financiers, and other middlemen help perform that coordination across distances, currencies, and time. They discover prices, move goods toward higher-valued uses, carry inventories through time, transfer risks, bridge the interval between production and payment, and create workable links between strangers. Much of this work is easy to overlook because the middleman’s margin is visible while the costs he reduces are not.

Ayn Rand understood that communism often advances through the moral weakness of those who should defend freedom. Comment “Rand” and we’ll send you an article about her ideas. For Rand, capitalism and communism were not two equally respectable systems to be weighed with detached neutrality. Capitalism had produced individual freedom, innovation, property rights, social mobility, and a scale of prosperity humanity had rarely seen. Communism, by contrast, concentrated power, destroyed private property, persecuted dissent, and turned economic life into an instrument of political control. But Rand’s deeper point was that a free society can betray itself when it loses confidence in its own principles. When businessmen, intellectuals, and politicians act as if economic freedom must apologize for existing, they surrender the moral ground to those who promise justice while expanding coercion.

Tariffs reproduce the economic logic of a war blockade. Comment “Free Trade” and we’ll send you an article on Henry George’s argument. Economist Henry George captured the paradox in Protection or Free Trade (1886), writing that protection teaches us to “do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.” He was extending the classical case against mercantilism associated most famously with Adam Smith. Protectionism can protect particular producers, but it does so by making everyone else navigate a more expensive and distorted economy.

“Greedflation” is an easy story to tell because it gives people a villain. Comment “Greedflation” and we’ll send you a video that explores this further. The greedflation story fails. Businesses did not suddenly discover greed in 2021. Firms have always wanted profits, yet prices do not rise across the whole economy unless something changes underneath: money, demand, supply, costs, regulation, energy, labor, logistics, or competition. When politicians blame greed, they often avoid harder questions. Did monetary policy weaken the dollar’s purchasing power? Did supply chains break? Did energy costs rise? Did regulations make production harder? Did trade barriers raise input prices? Did zoning or licensing restrict entry? The danger of the greedflation narrative is that it invites bad cures: price controls, and more political control.

There is a strange inconsistency in attacking capitalism while celebrating the abundance it makes possible. Comment “Capitalism” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. Many of capitalism’s loudest critics denounce markets from smartphones, laptops, streaming platforms, bookstores, universities, coffee shops, airplanes, and social media networks built through market incentives. They reject the system while enjoying its fruits. Free markets create a social process where ideas, capital, labor, risk, and consumer choice come together without central permission. Entrepreneurs experiment. Workers contribute skills. Consumers decide what survives. The result is the everyday abundance so many people take for granted: food variety, medical technology, digital tools, global communication, entertainment, transportation, and countless conveniences once unimaginable to ordinary people. Critics are free to dislike capitalism. A free society gives them room to say so.

Why the arguments for AI-socialist planning fail. Comment “AI Socialism” and we’ll send you a video on the topic. In a recent Financial Times column, European economics commentator Martin Sandbu suggests that powerful AI could overcome the information problem that defeated twentieth-century central planning. But Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, explains why the problem runs deeper. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s challenge was never only about computing power. Economic knowledge is scattered, changes when rules change, and is often discovered through real choices, prices, profits, losses, and experimentation. AI can process astonishing amounts of information. It cannot replace the market process that helps create and reveal the information planners would need in the first place.

AI has revived an old socialist hope: maybe central planning can finally work. Comment “AI Socialism” and we’ll send you the full video. The argument sounds tempting. Modern algorithms can process oceans of data. Firms already use AI to forecast demand, optimize logistics, manage inventories, and coordinate complex production. So why couldn’t a government use the same tools to plan an entire economy? Writers in Jacobin, tech leaders like Jack Ma, and even respected economists have suggested that massive data and artificial intelligence might make socialist planning more plausible than it was in the 20th century. But the old problem runs deeper than computing power. AI can help entrepreneurs discover better ways to serve consumers. It cannot replace the institutional process that reveals what people actually value. A smarter computer does not solve the knowledge problem.

Old television rules are colliding with 21st-century streaming. Comment “Streaming” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. When a company broadcasts World Cup matches for free on YouTube, regulators should not automatically treat that innovation as a problem to be classified, licensed, and burdened with old obligations. For much of the 20th century, broadcast regulation rested on a real constraint: spectrum was scarce. The internet changed that. Distribution became cheaper, audiences became easier to reach, and new creators could compete without asking permission from traditional gatekeepers. Yet many regulators still behave as if every new format must fit into boxes designed for another era. That mindset raises costs, slows experimentation, and protects established players that can afford compliance. Smaller firms, new platforms, and free models suffer most. Consumers lose when regulation turns innovation into paperwork. A free media market should begin with room to experiment, not with bureaucracy looking for a category.

Rent control sounds like an easy way to make housing affordable. In practice, it often rewards the wrong people and discourages new supply. Comment “Housing” and we’ll send you the full video. When government caps rents below market levels, landlords and builders face weaker incentives to create new housing. Capital moves elsewhere, maintenance becomes less attractive, and the city ends up with fewer homes than people want. If many people want the same artificially cheap apartment, landlords can become more selective. They may favor applicants with higher incomes, stronger credit, or lower perceived risk. The subsidy meant to help struggling families can end up going to someone who could have paid market rent anyway. Meanwhile, people with fewer options face longer searches, fewer available units, and more competition for the housing that remains. Higher demand plus restricted supply produces higher prices. Rent control tries to fight that reality by suppressing one price, but it leaves the underlying scarcity untouched.

Gen Z is trading smartphones for film cameras, typewriters, and blacksmithing classes. What does the current nostalgia trend reveal? Comment “Nostalgia” and we’ll send you the full essay. Gen Z is looking for depth, connection, and a sense of purpose that the always-on digital world hasn’t quite provided. The market is responding with alternative phones designed to reduce screen time, craft supply stores, trade schools, and distraction-blocking apps.

AI may be revolutionary and still disappoint investors in the short term. Comment “Bubble” and we’ll send you the full video. General-purpose technologies rarely transform the economy overnight. Electricity, computers, and the internet required more than invention. They required new infrastructure, new business models, new skills, new workflows, and years of experimentation. AI is likely to follow a similar path. Huge investments in chips, data centers, software, and talent can be rational if the long-term gains are enormous. But that does not mean every company spending aggressively today will earn quick returns. Firms still have to reorganize how work gets done. Workers need time to adapt. Managers need to discover where AI actually raises productivity. Consumers need products that solve real problems. That gap between technological promise and immediate profits is where bubble fears appear. The key question is whether today’s valuations assume benefits that may take much longer to arrive. AI can change the world. Investors can still overpay for the timeline.

Rent control represents a classic economic paradox: a policy framed around affordability that structurally constricts the very supply it seeks to democratize. Comment “Rent” and we’ll send you the video! Rigid price ceilings destroy the marginal return on building maintenance, forcing property owners to withhold thousands of viable units as “ghost apartments.” Capped yields disincentivize development, steering capital toward alternative asset classes and driving up non-regulated free-market rents under artificial supply constraints. Constrained by fixed pricing, landlords mitigate default risk by favoring high-solvency applicants—effectively turning price controls into unintended subsidies for high-earning households. Housing scarcity is rarely a market failure; it is predominantly an institutional bottleneck.

New York City is in a massive housing crisis, yet up to 50,000 apartments are sitting completely empty. Why? Comment “Rent” and we’ll send you the video! Welcome to the world of “ghost apartments.” Rent control and rent stabilization sound compassionate on paper, but in reality, they crush the housing supply. When complex building codes demand tens of thousands of dollars in renovations and local laws cap how much rent a landlord can collect, property owners can’t afford to fix the units. Their only option? Lock the doors and take the apartments off the market entirely. Even worse, rent-controlled units rarely end up helping the people who need them most. Landlords end up renting to wealthy applicants with flawless credit, or fresh college grads who state zero income right after graduation and go on to make six figures while keeping a subsidized apartment.

Housing costs are high because cities let too little get built. Comment “Housing” and we’ll send you the full video. In a 2021 paper, economists Kevin Corinth and Amelia Irvine estimated that rents could fall dramatically in places like San Francisco, Honolulu, San Diego, and Washington, DC if housing supply were allowed to respond more freely. Some argue that government should build, operate, and price housing directly. The promise is simple: public housing at rents ordinary people can afford. But that view runs into two hard problems. First, governments face political incentives, not profit-and-loss discipline. They can misallocate resources, delay construction, and hide costs through taxes and debt. Second, public housing does not repeal scarcity. Someone still has to choose where to build, who gets in, how rents are set, and who pays when costs exceed revenue.

Big investors make convenient villains. Housing shortages were built by rules that block construction. Comment “Housing” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. Politicians increasingly blame institutional investors for high rents and home prices, then propose bans on companies owning single-family homes. The slogan sounds appealing: homes are for people. The economics are much weaker. Investors usually buy homes to rent them, not to keep them empty. They add management, maintenance, capital, and competition to the rental market. In places where construction can respond, investor demand can even encourage builders to add more homes. The deeper problem is supply. When supply is blocked, every additional buyer, renter, or investor competes over too few homes. Housing becomes more affordable when cities allow more construction, more investment, more density, and more competition.

Economics has always been a challenge to political conceit. Comment “Groceries” and we’ll send you the full video. Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises understood that economics threatens those who believe society can be managed from above. It reminds politicians that prices are signals, resources are scarce, incentives matter, and good intentions cannot repeal tradeoffs. That lesson belongs in today’s grocery debate. Before handing the grocery aisle to City Hall, we should ask honest questions. What actually pushed prices up? Was it money creation, supply disruptions, energy costs, regulations, trade barriers, zoning, or taxes? What causes are being blamed because they sound politically useful? Which proposed cures would expand supply, and which would simply hide costs behind subsidies and public losses? Government-run stores may sound compassionate when families are frustrated by high prices. But shelves are stocked by production, logistics, competition, risk-taking, and price signals. Abundance comes from allowing markets to coordinate the work of millions.

Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow shows how health policies drive up costs. Comment “Contest” and we’ll send you a link to compete for $1,000,000, testing your knowledge of what’s really driving the affordability crisis! Kenneth Arrow was one of the most important economists of the twentieth century. A Nobel laureate whose work reshaped several areas of economics, he also helped create modern health economics with a famous 1963 paper asking why medical care does not work quite like ordinary markets. Arrow emphasized problems that are easy to recognize. Patients cannot predict when they will get sick, and they often know less than doctors about treatments, quality, and results. Those difficulties are often used to argue that health care needs more government direction. But Arrow also warned about the dangers of the cure. Rules, subsidies, and professional restrictions can raise costs, limit who may provide care, and block new ways of serving patients. Insurance can weaken the incentive to compare prices, making it easier for costs to rise without the usual pressure from consumers. Read this way, Arrow offers a useful lesson about affordability. Before adding another mandate, subsidy, or restriction, we should ask whether previous interventions helped create the high prices and limited supply policymakers now want to fix.

Free economies do something rare in human history: they turn ordinary ambition into sustained growth. Comment “Growth” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. For most of history, economic life moved slowly. People worked hard, innovation appeared sporadically, and living standards changed little from one generation to the next. Market economies changed that pattern. When private property is protected, prices are allowed to speak, entrepreneurs are free to experiment, and consumers can reward or reject what others produce, societies gain a powerful engine of discovery. Competition forces improvement. Profits guide resources toward what people value. Losses discipline waste. Innovation spreads when it works and disappears when it fails. That is why free-market economies have produced extraordinary growth compared with systems built on command, privilege, or bureaucratic permission. Prosperity comes from millions of people trying, trading, building, adapting, and serving one another.

Washington just handed taxpayers and their children a $40 trillion bill. Comment “Debt” and we’ll send you an article that dives deeper into the problem. On August 18, 2026, gross federal debt reached $40.047 trillion. Using the Census Bureau’s mid-August population estimate of about 342.8 million residents, that equals roughly $116,800 per person. James M. Buchanan warned that debt-financed consumption can reduce the resources available to build future productive capacity. As federal borrowing absorbs saving, interest rates can face upward pressure, private investment becomes more expensive, and capital accumulation may slow. The budgetary consequences compound over time. The Congressional Budget Office, Congress’s nonpartisan budget agency, projects net interest outlays of about $1 trillion in 2026 and $2.1 trillion by 2036, leaving fewer resources for other priorities and making refinancing costs increasingly important. Borrowing can also obscure the price of current government spending. Benefits arrive today while part of the tax burden is pushed forward, weakening political discipline and transferring obligations to future taxpayers.

Mamdani’s Delivery Protection Act promises to protect delivery workers, but it could end up closing doors for them. Comment “Delivery” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. If the law forces flexible contracting relationships into more expensive direct-employment arrangements, hiring becomes less profitable for some positions, especially for intermittent workers, young workers, or those whose productivity is closest to the new all-in cost of employment. Companies will not magically absorb those costs. They can hire fewer hours, reduce delivery zones, limit delivery windows, raise prices, automate more processes, or consolidate operations in fewer hands. Compliance costs also tend to hit smaller contractors harder than large firms that can internalize the entire operation. A policy designed to protect workers can reduce competition, accelerate automation, and make service more expensive for consumers. Economics does not respond to intentions. It responds to incentives, costs, and margins.

Gas prices make politicians impatient, but threats do not create fuel. Comment “Gas” and we’ll send you an article that explores this further. When leaders demand cheaper gasoline by pressuring retailers, they treat prices as political commands instead of market signals. Most US gas stations are independent small businesses, working with thin margins and wholesale costs they do not control. Their retail prices reflect taxes, replacement costs, local competition, labor, rent, credit-card fees, and the expense of staying open. If government pressures sellers to ignore those signals, the lesson from the 1970s returns: shortages, lines, rationing, panic buying, and weaker incentives to bring more supply to market. There is also a moral question. A high price for privately owned gasoline may be unpleasant, but a voluntary offer is not coercion. Buyers can compare, wait, negotiate, or walk away. Property rights include the right to decide whether to sell, to whom, and at what price. Free enterprise requires defending that right even when the price becomes politically unpopular.

The country that once stunned Soviet politician Boris Yeltsin with grocery abundance is now reopening an old debate. Comment “Groceries” and we’ll send you the full video. Rising food prices have made central planning fashionable again. In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has turned city-owned grocery stores into a political symbol: public land, taxpayer support, lower prices, and government-directed affordability. Mamdani’s politics ignores tradeoffs. Grocery stores operate with thin margins, complex logistics, constant spoilage risks, labor costs, supplier contracts, transportation constraints, and fierce competition. Lower prices cannot be commanded into existence without someone absorbing the cost. If taxpayers cover rent, construction, or losses, the price at checkout may fall while the real cost moves elsewhere. Economics does not bend to charisma. Good intentions do not stock shelves, manage inventory, discipline waste, or replace the knowledge generated by competition.

How one supermarket visit connects Soviet scarcity to today’s grocery debate. Comment “Groceries” and we’ll send you the full video behind this carousel. In September 1989, during his US visit, Boris Yeltsin made an unscheduled stop at a supermarket in Houston. What stunned him was not luxury, but ordinary abundance: shelves filled with food and household goods Soviet citizens rarely took for granted. The episode dramatized a basic economic question: how can millions of goods reach consumers without a planner deciding what to produce, where, and in what quantity? That question matters again because grocery prices rose sharply after 2020. The pandemic constrained supply while the money supply expanded rapidly. Yet the inflation that followed is often blamed on corporate greed. Prices do more than charge consumers: they coordinate scarcity and production. Price controls can suppress that signal, while government stores can hide losses by shifting them to taxpayers. Neither creates more goods.

Why did grocery prices rise so much? Comment “Groceries” and we’ll send you the full video. There are two ways to talk about rising prices. One is political: blame greed, accuse businesses, and search for villains. The economic way asks a better question: what pushed demand up or held supply back? Prices rise when more dollars chase the same goods, when production costs increase, when supply chains break, when trade barriers raise input prices, or when regulations make it harder for competitors to enter and serve consumers. That matters because grocery stores operate in a world of thin margins, intense logistics, perishable goods, labor costs, energy costs, transportation, land-use rules, and constant competition. If we want cheaper groceries, we need to understand what is distorting supply and demand.

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Foundation for Economic Education staff