A cornered rat has a deadly bite, or so says the lore from the 19th century, when rat baiting was common sport. The same is true of a cornered empire today. Every hour that goes by presents the evidence. It’s getting absolutely dangerous out there for anyone who dares to stand up against the empire …
On a Sunday afternoon swim, a 6-year-old boy was bugging me in a sweet sort of way. He rode up and down the handrail on the stairs in the shallow end of the pool where I was trying to sit in peace. He was laughing and talking, but I couldn’t understand a word through the …
A frightening story this week in The New Yorker tells of a Texas couple that headed toward the Texas-Louisiana border to buy a used car. They were carrying all their savings in cash. They were stopped by the police. The police found cash and a tiny pipe, and arrested them both. Then the police made …
Government can control many things, but it can’t control our minds and, therefore, our economic decisions. This has been a major source of frustration for the last two presidents. In 2001, President Bush demanded that Americans immediately go out and spend, racking up more debt in the hopes of inspiring economic recovery. President Obama has …
Edward Snowden is in big trouble for revealing that our government is doing to its own citizens what the U.S. once accused Russia of doing to its citizens. In what is really a bizarre turn of events, Russia has become a safe haven for an American whistle-blower.
I’ve just completed a heavy schedule of talks at the Agora Financial Investment Symposium in Vancouver. All my talks centered on information economics, Web startups, and the productivity of the Internet and its meaning. As usual, I learned as much from the attendees as (I hope) they learned from my talks. The research I did …
“What are you complaining about all the time?” people sometimes ask me. “I’m just about as free as I want to be.” Here’s the problem. How can we really know what we want if we’ve never had it before? The less free we are, the less we know what freedom feels like and how it …
That Edward Snowden has put the whole political, corporate, and governing class in a bind. With his revelations that a heretofore obscure agency has long been collecting all data on our digital lives, Snowden very plainly blew up the whole perception that government is somehow of, by, and for the people. The picture he paints …
Is there anything that we can do to stop the government’s data mining of our email, phone calls, and other digital habits? I moderated an entire panel on this subject during FreedomFest in Las Vegas last week. The room was packed from front to back, standing room only. Clearly, there is a great deal of …
I was daydreaming over the weekend. The subject: notable intellectual epiphanies I’ve experienced in the course of my life. These are moments when someone reveals something to you that shakes you up. It runs contrary to everything you ever thought possible. You resist it at first, but can’t come up with a proof to the …