The Cure for Poverty

One day, scientists will discover the cure for cancer. The world will erupt in joyous celebration – and rightly so. Cancer is a horrible disease that each year destroys the lives of millions of people, and finding a cure will be recognized as one of history’s greatest achievements.

There’s another disease that destroys vastly more lives each year than cancer. And we’ve found the cure for it – but no one is celebrating. Indeed, hardly anyone seems even to have noticed that we’ve already figured out how to rid the world of its most destructive scourge.

This disease is poverty. And the cure for poverty is the free market. That’s because the free market is the only environment in which entrepreneurs can flourish. And it’s the entrepreneurs – and only the entrepreneurs — who create the jobs that lift us all out of poverty.

Death fears of the Boomer Left

“Back in the Sixties,” sighs an ex-hippie lady I know, “everybody was happy. Really. Everybody.”

Gosh, that wasn’t what other people remember. Most teenagers go through a lot of ups and downs, and in the Sixties the Baby Boomers were rollercoastering through their own adolescence. (Some still are.)

When it was no longer sweet or noble to kill for the cause

If the great history lesson of the 20th century is that socialism does not work then the watershed event in that tragic enlightenment was the one that took place in Moscow 50 years ago this month – the so-called “secret speech” delivered by Nikita Khrushchev to a closed session of the 20th congress of the Soviet Communist party on February 25 1956, in which he mounted a devastating attack on Joseph Stalin, then not quite three years dead.

Environmentalism is dead — long live environmentalism!

I was recently invited to speak to C-Fact, a conservative environmentalist group at the University of Minnesota. To some this might sound about as weird as saying I was invited to speak to a group of Socialist Yachtsmen in Monaco. Of course, there are plenty of yachtsmen who are more or less socialists (whether they meet in Monaco, I have no idea — but I will gladly go speak to them there).