Leituras recomendadas

The secret of stock market success de Chris Dillow:

(...) The key to long-term success isn't innovation, because profits from this are bid away by competition. Nor does it come from keeping consumers happy - if they've nowhere else to go, it doesn't matter how happy they are. And nor does it come from employing good people, as these can walk.

Instead, corporate success requires monopoly power, the ability to exclude rivals. Reckitt's bosses understand this well. (...)

This would explain why firms with monopoly power - such as tobacco firms with their strong brands and addictive products or mining companies with their access to valuable resources - have been among the few FTSE 100 stocks to do even better than Reckitt.

As I said, a healthy stock market isn't necessarily a sign of a healthy economy (...)

The greatest trick the right ever pulled de Tom Freeman:

(...) But imagine two surgeons: one treats ingrown toenails, with a patient survival rate of 90%; the other treats gunshot wounds, with a patient survival rate of 85%. Which surgeon is better – the one with the higher rate, or the one doing the harder task?

It’s an enduring and cosy delusion among fans of (overt or de facto) socially selective schooling that the “standards” of such an “institution” are somehow independent of its “clientele”. The schools themselves certainly know this: that’s why they select. The parents know it, too: that’s why the ones who’ve paid top dollar for their catchment areas are angry about the new admission lotteries.

Baudelaire said: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist” (it was borrowed by ‘The Usual Suspects’). The greatest trick of conservative politics is to present itself as not political at all: contentious ideology becomes common sense while disagreement becomes leftist propaganda, political correctness and overbearing statism (...).

Intro de Kevin Carson, em The Art of Possible:

(...) My path to libertarianism was pretty convoluted. I started out about twenty years ago as a sort of stuffy paleocon (Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver–you know the drill). I drifted into the agrarian-decentralist wing of paleoconservatism, what Clyde Wilson called “the Jeffersonian conservative tradition,” and got heavily into the Levellers and commonwealthmen, the antifederalists, the agrarians and distributists, and so forth (you know, all the Crunchy Con stuff). From there I stumbled across Kirkpatrick Sale’s Human Scale, discovered an affinity for libertarians and decentralists of the Left, and went on to Benjamin Tucker, Ralph Borsodi, Lewis Mumford, and Ivan Illich. Today I consider myself a Leftist and carry a red card from the Wobblies, but I still feel considerable affection for the homeschoolers and gun rights people on the Right (...)