NYTimes: “[Javier Milei] wants to use his presidency not only to slash the country’s budget but to wage an ideological war and rewire the country’s mentality. He wants to dismantle what he calls the “aberrant” concepts of social justice and economic equality and make the nation’s core principles capitalism, the free market, a limited state and individualism. “We are at war,” Mr. Milei said at a right-wing festival last year, and added: “We are fighting a cultural struggle, an ideological battle, a war for the survival of our freedom.” At political rallies and international summits, in public policies and a deluge of social media posts, Mr. Milei has relentlessly sought to infuse Argentina with his libertarian ideals. And turn it into a model for the world.”
WSJ: “China is making strides in open-source artificial intelligence. Eighty percent of developers worldwide who use open-source AI tools are building with Chinese models, according to an estimate by our colleague Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Research from our firm and OpenRouter shows a significant increase in the use of Chinese open models last year, reaching in some weeks a high of 30% of all AI usage. In January, Alibaba’s Qwen family surpassed 700 million downloads to become the most widely adopted open-source AI system on the planet.”
Derek Thompson: “In thinking about the right historical analogy for AI, I’ve become very interested in the early history of electricity in the early 1900s.”
David Henderson: “Four facts about taxes: 1. High marginal tax rates cause economic harm. 2. High tax rates also cause tax avoidance. 3. Making tax rates the same for everyone would likely reduce the demand for government spending. 4. Most people, not just high-income people, think a proportional tax on income is more fair than a graduated tax with higher rates for higher-income people.”
