Vanita Kohli-Khandekar on Indian media: “At 468 million unique visitors a month, digital’s reach is just a little over half of TV’s 892 million. Print has been at a steady 421 million a month. On the revenue side — TV brings in roughly half the Rs 138,300 crore (pay and advertising) that Indian media and entertainment (M&E) made in 2020. In second place is digital at 17 per cent.”
WSJ: “Latin America suffers from too much government. Taxation, regulation, weak property rights and corruption conspire against entrepreneurship and self-discovery. Yet in the 1980s most of the region returned to democracy, giving the struggle for liberty a fighting chance. That chance is slipping away. In the past two decades, the institutions necessary to ensure political and ideological competition have been destroyed in several countries. Freedom dies when this happens…The problem isn’t any one election in which a politician, who prefers socialism over individual freedom, prevails. It’s the extremist view—left or right—that an electoral victory is a mandate to dismantle the institutional framework that protects minorities and blocks the ambitions of absolutism…Nations don’t vote for despotism. But looking back at Lenin and Hitler, Mr. Hinds shows that when a nation is seduced into handing over broad discretion to a messianic figure, that nation seals its fate. “Leaders play a crucial role in unifying people around a destructive idea. But such leaders emerge in response to a demand from the people,” Mr. Hinds writes.”
Donald Boudreaux: “Smithian economists – those who research, write, and teach in the tradition begun by Adam Smith – make their livings by exposing the many economic fallacies embraced by the man-in-the-street and peddled by vote-hungry politicians and click-crazy pundits. These economists will never want for work. The reason is that they are opposed by anti-Smithian economists who give to the man-in-the-street seemingly credible assurance that each and every one of his untutored instincts about the economy reflect his genius.”
