Vasant Dhar: “While India goes online, its bureaucratic processes that involve verification and controls are much harder to change. Administrative systems require controls to ensure they run correctly. But controls in India typically involve the heavy hand of its bureaucracy that require multiple verifications of all kinds of things that keep changing. This has created a massive asymmetry of power between the state and society. I’m reminded of James Robinson’s theory in his book The Narrow Corridor, which argues that strong democracies with a high state capacity maintain a healthy balance of power between the state and the people through strong trusted institutions. India doesn’t have it. Robinson argues that the Indian state reinforces an ossified caste-based social structure – “a cage of norms” – that limits its capacity to govern well. But I’ll go one step further and argue that Indian citizens are complicit in accepting and even encouraging corruption as a way of life.”
Mark Skousen: “If Adam Smith were alive today, he would be appalled by the never-ending federal deficits and out-of-control national debt. He would likely disapprove of the size of the welfare state and the military–industrial complex. He would probably be disappointed to see the U.S. tax code at around 7,000 pages, or about 75,000 pages if Treasury regulations are included in the total. The bloated bureaucracy would likely remind him of the mercantilist policies of his age. It’s easy to become pessimistic. But perhaps we can learn something from Adam Smith, who was the ultimate optimist. Nearly 250 years ago, he wrote, “The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition . . . is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite both of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration.””
Ross Douthat: “There are two possible futures for the virtual reality headset. In one, it remains an expensive, niche product used in specialized ways by hard-core gamers, remote workers looking for an edge and digital engineers and artists seeking absolute immersion in their work. In the other, the headset gradually displaces the smartphone as a normal means of interacting with virtual reality in public and semipublic settings: Subways are crowded with headset-wearers, spouses sit with his-and-hers headsets on the couch at night, nursing home common rooms are filled with seniors lost in V.R.-mediated memories, teenagers hang out headsetted in basements or (more likely) just “hang out” virtually from the safety of their own bedrooms, showing up as avatars inside one another’s goggles. Obviously, Apple, Meta and Google are all invested in the second future. The big money in Silicon Valley comes from controlling crucial platforms and getting other companies to pay for the privilege of having their programs or apps allowed inside, and if enough people migrate to the metaverse then the winner of the headset wars will be the king of infinite money as well as infinite virtual space.”
The Hill: “Price controls have never actually succeeded in combatting inflation. Instead, they have sown the seeds of dangerously anti-competitive markets and structural impediments to economic growth in the medium and long term. As economist Pierre Lemieux explains, price caps cause shortages, increasing the quantity demanded of a good while reducing its supply. As a result, sellers invest less in the production of the good, leading to an inefficient undersupply of the product in the future, to the detriment of consumers.”
Annie Dillard: “There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life.” [via Shane Parrish]
