James Broughel: “The real division is not between classical liberals and the New Right, but between those who trust individuals to run their own lives and those who think technocrats know better.”
WSJ: “Now that millennials control the purse strings at many businesses, sales professionals are carving out new ways of closing deals on everything from business software to chemicals and office equipment. Those tactics, some say, involve fewer trips to the golf course and more time corralling large buying teams that include senior managers, finance officials and end users at target companies. Cold calls are ceding ground to millennials’ preference to communicate via text or direct message. And just as they do as consumers, many millennial corporate buyers like to research business products online and on their own before ever talking to a salesperson. For veteran sales leaders like Dale Taormino, the generational shift means much less time working the phones and wooing a few executives at a prospective company—as she did in her early selling days. Instead, she operates like “more of a quarterback,” she says, coordinating large teams of players on both the seller’s and buyer’s sides.”
Tim Martinez on some of the attributes of a “perfect business”: “A defensible niche in the marketplace, voted best place to work… – outcompetes for top talent in the industry, the perfect blend of automation and human touch, evergreen product/service, recurring revenue business model, YoY profitability – requiring the least amount of capital to generate the most amount of profit, YoY increased market share, profitable for everyone involved – shareholders, employees, partners, … over delivers in the Value to Price equation.”
WSJ: “In that triplet [government of the people, by the people, for the people], Lincoln lays out the three fundamental elements of democracy. The first is consent—government of the people. “According to our ancient faith,” Lincoln said in his 1854 speech objecting to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which compromised on slavery, “the just powers of governments are derived from the consent of the governed.”…A second distinctive feature of democracy is the people’s voice in the affairs of governing—government by the people. It matters little whether that active voice is the direct participation of individuals, as in ancient Athens, or through their representatives, as in the American Constitution…The third basic element of democracy is a government that serves the interests of the people—government for the people—not those of a monarch, an aristocracy or an angry and contemptuous elite. For that reason, Lincoln wrote, government served to do only those things that need “to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves,” such as roads and bridges, schools and asylums, the enforcement of the laws and the defense of the nation.”
Law & Liberty: “When it comes to the biggest debate of economic policy—whether governments should exercise more or less control over economic life—[James] Otteson’s major assumption is simple: as human beings, we all have an equal worth and an equal moral agency. Thus, interventions into the market economy, whether they be large or small, are presumptively illegitimate because they supersede the judgment of peacefully contracting parties. This is true even when the goal is economic equality itself. Market participants have different talents, training, and goals, so implementing government policy that would force them into an identical status would mean disrespecting their freely chosen life paths.”
