Writing
Opinion, commentary, and essays
Shorter pieces on politics, economics, and ideas, written as I think them through.
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01
The Omniscient Planner
Grant a planner every fact in the world and a machine that never errs. He still cannot choose between steel and aluminium, because the number that choice needs is made by a contest he has abolished.
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02
Speculators and Markets: The Role of Risk-Takers in the Economy
The speculator is the market's most useful villain. He produces nothing you can hold and profits when others panic, which makes him the natural suspect whenever a market breaks. But the risk he is blamed for existed before he arrived, and most of what gets pinned on speculation turns out to be the work of whoever distorted the price he was only reading.
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03
From Luxury to the Masses: How Capitalism Empowered the Poor
Watch someone from Cuba or North Korea walk into a Western supermarket for the first time. The look on their face is disbelief, and that reaction captures what capitalism actually accomplished: it took the material conditions of the privileged and made them ordinary. The standard critique of capitalism asks who suffers in making a good. It never asks who can now afford that good for the first time.
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04
The Broken Building: How the Euro Was Designed to Fail
The euro was built on a bet: that living under one monetary roof would eventually teach twenty very different economies to behave like one. It didn't. And instead of fixing the architecture, Europe's central bank has been running heaters in the cold rooms ever since. Every fix works. Every fix makes the real problem slightly worse.
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05
Democracy Was Never the Goal
Most people fighting for democracy have forgotten what democracy is for. Democracy is a tool. It has value insofar as it protects something more fundamental: the freedom of every individual to live as they see fit. When democracy becomes the goal rather than the instrument, it stops serving that purpose — and the drift toward the very tyranny it was meant to prevent begins.
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06
Good Intentions Are Not a Constraint on Power
Madison knew that good men would not always hold office. Both the left and the right expand government authority when it serves them, without reckoning with what they are building for whoever inherits it. Classical liberals are the only tradition that takes that problem seriously.
