Last week, I started posting about my investigation into the apparent implosion of the Libertarian Party. You can read my previous posts here, here, and here. In this post, I try to draw some conclusions, and I hope to hear your reactions.   When you talk with leaders from each side of this conflict it’s clear that even though both camps are much, much closer ideologically than they’d admit, ultimately Aristotle was right – humans are fundamentally political creatures.  The entire episode reminds me of a conversation I had at one of my first Liberty Fund conferences when I was hired, directed by Pierre Lemieux.  I was talking with a conferee who was eyeing me suspiciously and asked me, which economist I preferred, Mises or Hayek.  I told him that as a political scientist I was more drawn to Hayek, and this prompted him to label me a socialist, turn away from me and find someone more “orthodox” to chat with. The broad contours of a liberty-based political movement would be simply less government and more personal freedom and responsibility in realm x.  One would hope people could compromise on the range of constriction on government and expansion of individual freedom somewhere between 100% and 5%.  But for more than 5 decades the Libertarian Party has been unable to create a broad consensus on how to pursue those goals.  That leaves the world without the prospect of seriously considering more liberty during public deliberations over governance alternatives.  Elections, admittedly highly imperfect ways to decide governance, are worse for not providing voters with a wide range of options and choices.  The frustration for observers and non-combatant libertarians in this conflict is that we face an upcoming election featuring two deeply unpopular, anti-liberty candidates. The fear that libertarians will find no representation in this election is not invalid.  Before the infamous Aleppo moment, there was a world in which Gary Johnson and Bill Weld might have done even better in 2016, regardless of who won.  But after the meltdown, Weld’s statements were hardly consistent with what most libertarians believed. Frustration and unrest caught up with the Old Guard.  Conversely there’s no reason to believe that maintaining a hard core, don’t tread on me, Rothbard/Paul line is the only way forward for the party.  The question has been how to bridge that gap and maintain the energy and enthusiasm that the Mises Caucus brings with the mainstream demand for a more professional, unified LP during national and state elections.  In theory, the two sides need each other.  If Nick Sarwark and Steven Nekhaila are both right, the energetic, idealistic, younger crowd complements and needs some of the experience and pragmatism of the Old Guard.  Conversely, the Old Guard won’t win by strategy alone.  There won’t be success without a motivated core. If recent events tell us anything it is during crises, periods in which voter dissatisfaction is at its peak, that non-mainstream alternatives are taken most seriously.  For evidence of this, look no further than Javier Milei, who just became the president of Argentina, armed with many of the ideas of intellectual libertarian economists.  His election only happens in a context that creates the unique conditions for a highly unconventional alternative – an economic basket case.  Is libertarianism likely to win in the short term?  No. But one can easily imagine current fiscal and monetary policy leading us closer to a crisis, if not of Argentine proportions.  Might that be the LP’s moment? One unique feature of the US is our federal system, and the LP’s decentralized nature will provide an interesting experiment for comparing the two approaches.  In theory, we should see if one model, the Old Guard or Mises Caucus, is more successful in state and local races over the next few election cycles.  That might be a useful guide for the future of the party, and allow for different versions of the ideas to flourish is the remarkably diverse political geography in the US. Or perhaps libertarianism, or the liberty movement generally, is ironically, simply unsuited to solve collective action problems.  A group of strong-willed individuals- whether they are raised on Austrian economics, Ayn Rand’s novels, or John Stuart Mill’s defense of liberty with limits, will frequently disagree on the foundation of individual freedom and limited government, and not be amenable to compromise and consensus building.  It is not merely cat herding; it is the equivalent to teaching a group of cats synchronized swimming. Libertarians will be well served to heed the prescient words of James Buchanan on this matter.  Buchanan wrote in 2005, that while collectivist ideas at that time were largely in disrepute, he believed that the appeal of such governance was undeniable because individuals typically want to evade personal responsibility for their personal circumstances and challenges.  If the participants in this conflict looked in the mirror they might very well know deep down who to blame for the failure to coordinate and compromise.  It’s not the other side; it is themselves.   G. Patrick Lynch is a Senior Fellow at Liberty Fund. (0 COMMENTS)

Some people are surprised that their doctor would charge them for email replies when they take more than a few minutes to prepare. One patient said (“Your Doctor Replied to Your Email. That’ll Cost $25,” Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2024): “Patients like me who are complex patients, we require a lot of interaction,” says Falandys, who is a disability advocate. “It just feels a little intimidating when you open the portal and the first thing it says is ‘be aware, we’re going to bill,’” she says. “We have to send these messages and we shouldn’t have to think to ourselves, ‘Should I send this?’” The economics is simple. When a resource is used, somebody necessarily pays. We are unfortunately not in the Garden of Eden. Time is a scarce resource because it is not infinite and has alternative uses. Instead of answering emails, the doctor could spend time seeing another patient (which we would call a customer in economics), continue reading an article in a medical journal, get home earlier to see his children, or simply relax. (One can imagine the doctor reading Anthony de Jasay’s The State on a hammock near the beach, as shown on the featured image of this post.) The value for the doctor of what he (or she) would most prefer to do instead is the cost of the email. Note the concept of “opportunity cost,” which is what every economic cost is. (If the doctor is on an employer’s time, his cost or part of it will be shifted to the company’s; but let’s keep our model simple and ignore that.) Somebody has to pay the cost of the doctor’s time: the doctor himself, or the customer, or the insurance company, or a third party such as the taxpayer. The only problem is who will pay or who will pay which part of the cost. It is the same with any supplier. Sometimes a supplier renders a “free” service, but it is always paid by somebody. Your appliance repairman does not charge you when replying to your infrequent emails: it’s a small goodwill gesture or marketing cost to keep you as a customer. The market for medical services has its own peculiarities such as legally restricted competition (one way to see this is when it’s the customer who gives Christmas gifts to his supplier), matters of limbs and death, and the omnipresence of third parties such as insurers. But this does not change the reality that resources are scarce and their use has a cost that somebody must pay. *************************************** The featured image is a courtesy of DALL-E, ChatGPT4’s artist colleague. The bot struggles to draw human figures, especially on hammocks with drinks. Doctor relaxing on the beach, which is conveniently located just off her office   (2 COMMENTS)

Reason magazine has an article entitled: More Money Does Buy More Happiness But the article itself is more nuanced: A new study in the journal Emotion presents a challenge to the Easterlin finding. Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, and A. Bell Cooper, a data scientist at Lynn University, examined data collected from 44,000 adult respondents to the General Social Survey (GSS) between 1972 and 2016 and found that more money does, in fact, correlate with more happiness. I know that “correlation doesn’t imply causation” has become a cliché, but it remains an important concept.  I actually see two problems with the “money buys happiness” claim: 1. I would expect happy people to be richer than unhappy people, even if wealth had no causal impact on happiness.  Depressed people often lack ambition, feeling fatalistic about life. 2. Happiness is difficult to define.  One definition relates to mood—happy people are people in a cheerful mood.  Another definition relates to general life satisfaction. I know some grouchy people who are satisfied with what they have accomplished in life.  Are they “happy”?  I suppose it depends how one defines happiness: Nevertheless, Easterlin and other scholars continue to argue that the “Easterlin Paradox” is real. Some cite 2010 research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Princeton economist and Nobelist Angus Deaton and his colleagues that supposedly found happiness does not increase once an individual’s income reaches about $75,000 per year. What the study actually found is that more money does not affect the level of day-to-day joy, stress, and sadness but does correlate strongly with rising measures of overall life satisfaction. If I were to suddenly lose 98% of my wealth, I might tell pollsters than my “life satisfaction” had gone down.  But back when I actually had 98% less wealth than today, my mood was about the same is it is now. I remain agnostic on the question of whether wealth increases happiness.  I am more sympathetic to the claim that freedom increases happiness, and I also believe that freedom leads to higher wealth.  So I’m not at all surprised by the fact that international comparisons show a positive correlation between wealth and happiness. (0 COMMENTS)

To hear some people tell it, profits are pretty easy to come by. People accumulate wealth and enjoy unearned income by taking interest and capital gains. What is profit but a tax levied by the powerful on the powerless? What could be easier than kicking back, lighting a cigar, and watching the profits roll in like they do in so many mobile games? Quite a lot of things, actually. Losing money is easy. It’s like starving: you don’t have to do much to make it happen. Earning profits–and I use the word earning deliberately–is just like earning any other kind of income. It’s hard. Earning wages requires working. Earning interest requires waiting. Earning rent is a little easier, perhaps, but future rents to land and other resources are capitalized into present prices. Earning profit requires judgment. This is how innovative entrepreneurs like Sol Price and Sam Walton were so successful. They looked at how people bought and sold, found it lacking, and introduced new ways of retailing. They chose wisely, and they were rewarded handsomely. But if Sol Price and Sam Walton finished rich, that means someone else had to finish poor, right? Wrong. Price, Walton, and other successful entrepreneurs profit by creating something out of nothing. Obviously, they can’t create new matter, but they can rearrange it into “Big Box Stores” that no one had ever thought to put in southern California or northwest Arkansas. We academics and others working in the non-profit sector are even pretty easy at fooling ourselves into thinking that we have forsaken the easy life of profit-seeking and wealth accumulation to do something more difficult, courageous, and noble. It’s not easy, though, to give people what they want at prices they are willing to pay without consuming even more valuable resources in the process. It’s one thing to pontificate about how this or that business idea would be successful, but it’s quite another to put your own money where your mouth is so you can actually try to make an idea work, all the while knowing that as the residual claimant, any losses come out of your pocket. I’m hard-pressed to think of anything much more noble than finding ways for people to get more bread for the sweat of their brow. As Ayn Rand’s character Francisco d’Anconia explains, successful entrepreneurs make money. Successful entrepreneurs win, but the biggest winners from the Bourgeois Deal are consumers like the rest of us. To the extent we have left them alone to try new things, they have made us rich. Yes, interventionism means a lot of distortion and profits accruing to people not because they innovate successfully but because they prevent others from innovating. I would hope that both the left and the right could find a common cause in fighting the rent-seeking society. However, it’s the rare person I encounter who despises modern capitalism because the state introduces distortions making it hard for people to compete. They tend to hate capitalism precisely because it is a system where people like Sol Price and Sam Walton–neither descended from royalty or deity, as far as I know–got rich by making other people richer. Business history is littered with failure. Making money is hard, and those who do it deserve our gratitude rather than our contempt.   Art Carden is Professor of Economics & Medical Properties Trust Fellow at Samford University, and he is by his own admission as Koched up as they come: he has an award named for Charles G. Koch in his office, he does a lot of work for and is affiliated with an array of Koch-related organizations, and he has applied for and received money from the Charles Koch Foundation to host on-campus events. (0 COMMENTS)

The Economist has an interesting article discussing two charter cities in Kenya: Unveiled in 2008 as a $15bn smart city project, Konza Technopolis was supposed to be the heart of Kenya’s “silicon savannah” that, by 2020, would create 100,000 jobs and add 2% to GDP. Three years and many missed deadlines later, there is still far more evidence of savannah than silicon. By contrast, Tatu City, on the northern outskirts of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, is flourishing. Some 23,750 people already live, study or work there and 78 businesses have made it home. Moderna, an American drugmaker, is opening a $500m vaccine manufacturing facility, its first in Africa. Zhende Medical, a Chinese medical-supplies manufacturer, is also setting up shop. Tatu and Konza were conceived at the same time. Each, at roughly 5,000 acres, is of a similar size. Both aspire to house populations of more than 200,000 people. And both have been designated Special Economic Zones (SEZs), meaning that the businesses they house are eligible for tax benefits and other incentives. Why is one more likely to succeed than other? The first difference they identify is ownership: Konza’s proprietor is the state. Tatu City’s is Rendeavour, a big private urban land developer. As a result, these two cities have followed very divergent paths: Tatu City’s land ownership is transparent. Konza’s, until recently, was not. . . . Tatu works because it has the freedom to set its own rules. It is more than just an SEZ, a concept that has mostly underwhelmed in Africa. Experts categorise it instead as a “charter city”, a loosely defined term that in essence describes an urban development with enough freedom to bypass weak state institutions and shape its own governance. People often assume that “privatized’ means the same thing as “unregulated free for all”.  Actually, privately developed cities have an incentive to set rules that create a pleasant environment: Freewheeling Nairobi types who venture into the development can initially be aghast to see speed limits strictly enforced. Rule-breakers even have their wheels clamped. A strict no-littering policy means Tatu’s streets, compared with the rest of the metropolis, are eerily clean. “We are like Singapore,” jokes Stephen Jennings, Rendeavour’s CEO. It is increasingly clear that large governments are not good at urban planning.  In many countries, including the US, local governments have counterproductive zoning rules, provide poor transportation infrastructure, and are ineffective at law enforcement.  I expect to see many more experiments along the lines of Tatu City. (0 COMMENTS)

In my first post last week, I described the most recent schism to rock the Libertarian Party- a party never known for its ideological consistency. I next reported on a conversation I had with a party leader about the Mises caucus’ hostile takeover. Ground zero for the Mises Caucus revolution is probably in New Hampshire, home to the Free State Project.  The Free State Project was the brainchild of Jason Sorens, a libertarian public intellectual and researcher.  Since there isn’t a majority of libertarians in the US, Sorens and others believed that the best way to create a sort of safe haven and example of libertarian policies would be to infuse a state with freedom loving individuals to push it towards “don’t tread on me” living.  Over the past twenty years more than 6,000 people have moved to New Hampshire as part of the project. And that migration of free state participants has made the New Hampshire Libertarian Party one of the staunchest supporters of the Mises Caucus.  Its social media accounts and ideological persuasion are firmly in the “don’t tread on me” camp and frequently touch on very unconventional topics such as empowering private companies to raise their own militaries and attacking Martin Luther King as a socialist on MLK day. One very prominent libertarian living in the state is not a fan of the group – Nick Sarwark, the former national chair of the Libertarian Party who was ousted by the Mises Caucus in 2022.  Sarwark is a party lifer. His dad took him to party meetings in Arizona when he was young and he never stopped attending.  He’s lived through the ups and downs of belonging to the LP and seeing the internal strife.  His goal has been to make the party more relevant. Like the Crane/Koch led LP of the early 1980’s, Sarwark and his supporters oversaw the most successful national campaign in the history of the LP when the party nominated Gary Johnson and Bill Weld as their ticket in 2016.  Notwithstanding Johnson’s infamous Aleppo moment and Weld’s indiscretions at the end of the race, they managed to win more than 3% of the national vote – the most for an American third party candidate since Ross Perot and scorn from those on the left who “blamed” the LP for Trump’s victory. And yet, in spite of the success, or perhaps because of it, the historical tensions that have rocked the LP re-emerged, and the Mises Caucus removed him in 2022.  I spoke to Sarwark to get his perspective on the schism and the path forward for the party.  The sting of losing to the upstart group still obviously lingers, but he understands the history of division within the party.  He reminds me of the split in the 80’s, resulting in the formation of the Mises Institute and the exile of Murray Rothbard.  But he attributes this current split to what he describes as “conservative” voices wanting more of a say in the LP.  In fact he goes further arguing that “the party is not at war with itself, this is false framing.”  He claims the “paleo right” manipulated the Mises Caucus and others to push the LP away from gaining relevance because it served as a threat to Trump. For Sarwark this dispute has its origins in the Trump administration that empowered the Mises Caucus to pursue a more socially conservative agenda.  He points to the events in Charlottesville in 2017 along with the rise of the MAGA approach to governing that he argues are closer to the Paul/Rothbard approach on topics like immigration and crime.  Making matters worse, Sarwark publicly criticized that wing of the party, and Paul specifically, which made the fight personal. But Sarwark believes that Trump operatives such as Steve Bannon made the rise of the Mises Caucus possible after the election in 2020.  He sees strategic value for Trump in moving the LP further right, thus eliminating a legitimate third party alternative that differed substantially from the Republicans.  Sarwark admitted that he doesn’t have concrete evidence to support this, but believes the money and resources that allowed the Mises Caucus to mobilize didn’t come from party regulars. And he points to many examples in which the LP itself has suffered as a result.  Membership, he claims, is “cratering.”  He believes that the New Hampshire LP is a way to “wind up college kids” with short term energy, but without a long term plan to “succeed”.  But obviously success for the two groups varies – tremendously.  The Mises Caucus values prominence on social media and ideological consistency.  The Old Guard sees success in vote totals and office holding, but that normally involves compromise. Sarwark also points to the growing division among the state parties and begins listing states that fall on one side of the conflict or another.  Several states are suing the national party to cut off access to their fundraising and avoid being aligned with the Mises Caucus.  Other pro-Mises state parties appear to be working with the GOP in places like Colorado as another sign that the Mises Caucus doesn’t have the best interests of the LP at heart. For Sarwark the LP can be one of two things.  First it can be an avatar for your views or an organization that tries to expand its tent.  In his widely viewed debate with prominent Mises Caucus supporter Dave Smith, Sarwark defended the Johnson/Weld ticket by arguing such a pairing was the most effective way to introduce the ideas of liberty to the public at large and expand the base.  He compared the ticket and introducing basic libertarianism to a wider audience to eating an elephant.  His position is to eat the beast piece by piece, while he claims the Mises Caucus wants to force feed the public with the whole thing. Still I asked him about Weld, who was probably the kindling that set off the blaze of the Mises Caucus, and he admits that while he still speaks to him the Governor, they still don’t agree about how the campaign was run and what to take away from it.  Still Sarwark is long term very sanguine about the LP’s prospects, if his side can retake control.  He notes that the radicalism has cost the Mises Caucus resources.  Money is drying up for the LP nationally (and there is some evidence to support this) along with the loss of “professionals” who have helped the party maintain ballot access in all 50 states.  He also believes that “MAGA Money” won’t be coming to the party during this cycle because Trump is likely the GOP nominee.  This will put more pressure on the Mises Caucus. What is the path forward for the LP, if there is one, from its current conflict?  I’ll ponder that, along with other currents in American society and politics in the final installment.   G. Patrick Lynch is a Senior Fellow at Liberty Fund. (0 COMMENTS)

First, let’s talk about spurious scholarly journals. The Financial Times reports on a palace revolt of academics against a private publisher who made some changes to a presumably (and understandably) unprofitable academic journal (“Academics Boycott Wiley Gender Journal After ‘Anti-Woke’ Shift,” March 15, 2024): Academics are boycotting a leading gender studies journal owned by New York-listed publisher Wiley after its editors and policies were changed in what they characterise as an “anti-woke” drive against radical views in the pursuit of profits. Nearly 500 advisers, reviewers, contributors and readers have written resignation letters to Wiley in protest at the “mainstreaming” of the Gender, Work and Organization journal by changing its aims, including the removal of references to queer theory on its website. A description of the journal on Wiley’s website explains what it is supposed to be after the changes: Issues of critical importance as Gender, Work & Organization moves forward include feminist knowledge and practice, feminist philosophies and praxis, diversity, intersectionality, transnational, postcolonial, and decolonial feminisms, feminist ecology, postfeminist humanism/posthumanist feminism, embodiment, affect and organising, gendered power, resistance and activism, gender and global labour markets, critical analyses of neoliberalism, postfeminism, femininities and heroic versus post-heroic leadership approaches. It does not look very scholarly, does it? It is at least unclear how this sort of discourse advances the search for truth and our knowledge of how society works. It is of course desirable that anybody who wants to defend the positions of Gender, Work & Organization be free to do it, with his own resources or those he levies among voluntary partners and donors. Wiley’s incentives (and its competitors’) are to make the most profits by supplying what consumers are willing to pay for. Similarly, we can understand the incentives of academics—especially those who defend obtuse theories of the flat-earth type—to deal with government bureaucracies rather than with private firms: it is incomparably easier for them to be subsidized by invisible taxpayers. Why can’t these academics create and sell, or otherwise finance, their own journals? The question is all the more relevant as their academic salaries and perks are already partly or, for those in public universities, totally subsidized by governments, which in large part explains how academic journals can get free articles. Second, let’s put these issues in an educational perspective. Education is, as many goods more or less, what economists call an “experience good”: you cannot know how much you will enjoy it, if you enjoy it at all, without actually consuming it. You could not know before learning Latin how you would enjoy reading Virgil in his language. You could not know before learning economics how many secrets of the social world you would discover from reading (and understanding) Anthony de Jasay or John Hicks or so many others. Hence the idea that it is good to educate children at an age where the opportunity cost of learning is low—this low cost being partially explained by the plasticity of their minds. Even in the case of young adults, who should of course not be forced to be educated, it is a good idea to try and persuade them to continue their education, if they have the required mental capacity and the opportunity cost of their time is not too high. In these conditions, anyone will nearly certainly, later in life, be happy he (or she) learned more. At any event, it must be easier, if one later so desires, to forget what one has learned, than to learn from scratch what one has no idea of. One potential problem is that the suppliers of education (the producers of education services) have their own self-interests and incentives. They try to “maximize their profits” in the pecuniary sense and also possibly for the pleasure of ideological activism. These two motivations explain their greed for trade unions armed with extraordinary privileges from the state, and for conventional tenure too. The danger is that they will deliver education not according to what consumers will later wish they had learned, but according to their interests as producers. So education becomes a club or cartel of producers instead of a market for the services that children’s parents or young adults want. For sure, other motivations may be present like a teaching “vocation” and a sense of duty, but they will be overruled if more practical incentives counter them. Any economist will know that competition is the way to avoid the club-of-producers danger. If many suppliers of education (schools, universities, teachers from different schools of thought) compete, none of them will have the power to exploit consumers. It’s like for “ordinary” trade: the consumer is unlikely to be exploited if he can buy his wares from several sources and no supplier is regulated out of the market. Protectionism is a way for suppliers, assisted by the secular (coercive) hand of the state, to transform international trade into a club of national producers. Similarly, government regulation and subsidization are the means by which education suppliers can transform their market into a club of producers. Education then becomes what the educators want to propagandize, which will typically align with what politicians and bureaucrats (the ones who write the checks) want their subjects to learn. Isn’t this what education has become? So-called scholarly journals such as Gender, Work & Organization are one illustration in higher education. They would not exist if taxpayers were not forced to pay educators to spend their time reading these spurious journals, writing in them, and pushing their institutions’ libraries to subscribe. Or, more exactly, these journals would be webzines published on private websites by eccentric theorists. It is good that eccentrics exist (see John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty). Who knows, they may be right. But they should compete on the free market of ideas without extorting subsidies and other privileges. ***************************** The featured image of this post, created by OpenAI’s DALL-E, represents the sad but fictional story of a Professor of Queer Theory (he could also be a DEI university administrator) who was laid off after a reduction in government subsidies to “higher education.” Fortunately, he was able to find a job as a McDonald’s burger flipper, upgrading his life from exploiting his fellow humans to serving them. Fictional woke academic laid off after a reduction in government subsidies to higher education (0 COMMENTS)

In February 2012, I wrote on EconLog: Nevertheless, there is a way that the federal government now cuts access to contraceptives in a way that substantially raises the cost. Were the government to get rid of the regulation that does this, women’s access to contraceptives would rise and the cost would fall. What is the regulation? It’s the one that requires contraceptive pills to be prescription drugs. If, instead, drug companies were allowed to sell contraceptives over the counter, access would rise and cost would fall. It took the feds only 12 years. People can now buy oral contraceptives on Amazon. (1 COMMENTS)

A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll reveals 69% of Americans believe the American Dream, once a beacon of hope and aspiration, no longer holds true. The cornerstones of this dream, characterized by the opportunity for homeownership, family life, financial security, and upward mobility, seem elusive to many. It’s too often overshadowed by economic uncertainties and social stratification, particularly for Millennials. Voices from across the political spectrum lament the erosion of upward mobility, decry the “injustices” of capitalism, and mourn the emergence of what some are likening to a modern caste system.  For this generation, witnessing the fallout of the 2008 Great Recession, the burden of mounting student debt, and the specter of unattainable homeownership has cast a pall over their prospects. It’s a grim reality compounded by a sluggish wage recovery in the decade following the 2008 crash, further perpetuating the narrative of a dream deferred. Yet, amidst the prevailing gloom, glimmers of hope emerge from the annals of economic data, painting a more nuanced picture of the American Dream’s resilience. Contrary to the doomsday prophecies, evidence suggests that, while hindered, the dream is alive. Since 1990, inflation-adjusted average hourly wages have surged by at least 20%, a testament to the enduring spirit of economic progress. Despite disruptions in specific sectors, well-paid job growth remains robust, with most individuals in their 40s outpacing their parents’ income trends. Moreover, recent milestones, such as the FDA’s approval of the first Alzheimer’s treatment and the continued long-term increase in life expectancy, underscore the nation’s strides in enhancing overall well-being. Though often overshadowed by doom-laden narratives, these indicators serve as beacons of hope. Rapidly unfolding technological advancements have democratized access to information and opportunities, leveling the playing field for aspiring entrepreneurs and innovators. The rise of e-commerce platforms and remote work arrangements has opened new avenues for economic participation, empowering individuals to pursue their dreams with unprecedented flexibility and autonomy. For those who remain skeptical, look no further than to the increasing annual immigration of people passing across our borders to take hold of opportunity. In a nation shaped by waves of immigration and cultural exchange, diversity is not just a buzzword—it’s a source of strength and dynamism. Whether fleeing political persecution, seeking economic opportunity, or simply yearning for a fresh start, immigrants are drawn to America by the promise of a better tomorrow.  Still, these triumphs do not absolve valid criticisms.  Homeownership remains increasingly difficult to attain for many, making what some consider part of the American dream out of reach. Higher education, what’s long been a way to earn more income, has become unaffordable for many people and the quality of education for a job after college has been declining precipitously, reducing the ability and need for a college degree.  Moreover, inflation, fueled by lax monetary policies to fund excessive government spending, continues to erode consumers’ purchasing power, exacerbating the financial burdens of everyday Americans. In an environment where living costs have been soaring and higher education, a crucial component of achieving upward economic mobility, remains out of the reach of many; the path up the ladder can be fraught with many obstacles.  As with any economic issue, more free market dynamism provides a better path forward. Each person’s unique American dream is far from dead, but its pulse has been weakened by big-government policies that inhibit voluntary exchange and human flourishing.  By dismantling regulatory barriers and curbing government largesse through fiscal and monetary rules, we can empower individuals in the private sector over politicians and bureaucrats in government to innovate and thrive, fostering an environment where one’s American dream transcends rhetoric and becomes a tangible reality. As we navigate the complexities of today, we must recognize that the American dream is not a static ideal but a dynamic path for each person. By embracing innovation and championing economic freedom with limited government, we can unleash the full potential of an American dream for each person. This will help ensure our master resource is the very people who will thrive in a system of free-market capitalism now and for generations to come.    Vance Ginn, Ph.D., is founder and president of Ginn Economic Consulting, LLC and an Associate Research Fellow with AIER. He is chief economist at Pelican Institute for Public Policy and senior fellow at Americans for Tax Reform. He previously served as the associate director for economic policy of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, 2019-20. (0 COMMENTS)