I just finished watching Django Unchained this weekend and I highly recommend it. One of the things that helped me enjoy it fully is the idea that anything a slave does to those who enslave him, even up to killing the enslavers and the enablers of the enslavers, is justified. That’s a view I’m quite comfortable with. If you’re not comfortable with it, you probably will not get the pleasure out of Django Unchained that I did. Thinking about the movie got me thinking about former federal judge and law/econ scholar Richard Posner’s views on Herman Melville’s novel Billy Budd. If you don’t want...
The Future Is Getting Better All the Time
"In the time that it takes you to read the first chapter, over 2,000 people will have escaped poverty." So says a blurb on the back cover of Johan Norberg's book Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future (London: Oneworld, 2016). The book lives up to the hype. In ten chapters, on topics including food, life expectancy, violence, poverty, the environment, literacy, and freedom, Norberg, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. and the European Centre for International Political Economy in Brussels, documents persuasively how pretty much all of the world has gotten...