OpenMarket: Business and Government

I’ve been interested over the last several years to see Dave Rubin’s metamorphosis from stand-up comedian to podcast co-host to serious public affairs interviewer and host of The Rubin Report. This week he has released a pair of conversations with one of my favorite academics, Prof. Rajshree Agarwal of the University of Maryland.

One of the most glaring moments of hypocrisy during yesterday's Facebook hearing came from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) telling Zuckerberg that he felt “betrayed” by the Facebook CEO, while pitching his digital privacy and security bill, which would, according to the Senator, help secure our data. ​

Much of the political class in Washington, D.C. is currently holding its breath for the big event of the week: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s long-awaited Capitol Hill testimony, starting tomorrow morning before a joint session of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees and continuing the next day before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. 

We truly do live in amazing times. And according to Michael Munger, who directs Duke University’s multidisciplinary PPE program (it stands for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics), we are on the cusp of a revolution that could accelerate the ongoing betterment of humankind. He makes his case in the new book Tomorrow 3.0: Transaction Costs and the Sharing Economy.

For several years now, HumanProgress has been an excellent source of data and scholarship on major demographic trends around the word. As longtime fans know, over the long term and in most places, human quality of life has been increasingly steadily on every measure, from poverty to literacy to longevity to leisure time. And in the places in which the opposite appears to be happening, we often have clear evidence that oppressive and economically illiterate government policies are to blame.  

For a lot of small businesses in America, taxes are not just an expensive hassle but a scary, anxiety-inducing ordeal. Taxes are the number-one concern for small businesspeople in general, and especially so for the smallest entrepreneurs—individuals with a one-person business that may not even be their full-time living.

Anti-technology hysteria continues to build in the European Union. Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition, confirmed today that she is still considering breaking up Google into smaller companies, ostensibly to protect online competition. This follows the Commission’s proposals for “Fair Taxation of the Digital Economy” that appeared on March 21^st, which seek to redefine where profits for digital companies are registered and subject to corporate taxation, as well as introducing a new “interim tax” on revenues to generate more money for the Commission’s coffers.

Human Achievement Hour is the Competitive Enterprise’s Institute’s annual celebration of innovation and progress. During this hour, people around the world pay tribute to the advancements that inventors and entrepreneurs have created in every field, from health and energy to communications and transportation. These advancements allow us to live richer, fuller lives and protect us and our families from unpredictable hazards, both in everyday life and during emergencies and disasters.

Through his publications and scholarly work in the 1980s and 90s, the economist Julian Simon challenged the conventional wisdom and the intellectual position of the “anointed,” that resources were becoming increasingly scarce and human demand for them ever larger and more threatening to the survival of the planet. The response of the elites to their own prognostication was the endorsement of a (for some) centrally-planned government bent on regulating, rationing, controlling, and suppressing human individuality and agency. 

It is enormously gratifying that this year’s winner of the Julian Simon Award is Hernando de Soto, whose work around the world to define, allocate, and defend property rights has lifted millions out of poverty. Human flourishing is almost impossible without property rights and the rule of law, and so before millions of poor people around the world are able to realize Julian Simon’s optimistic vision, they need de Soto to defend their rights.