The free market is often characterized by some as a Darwinian or Hunger Games-style survival of the fittest competition. But that’s seldom true. Take the Wall Street Journal headline this week: Sanofi to Help Make Moderna Covid-19 Vaccine for U.S. As the story explains, Sanofi has signed up to make as many as 200 million […]
The Private Sector’s COVID-Era Triumph
<This op-ed first appeared in National Review on January 11, 2021> While government struggled mightily to steer us through the coronavirus pandemic, the free market got to work. Popular culture most often portrays businessmen and the corporations they head as greedy and ruthless. A lightly regulated free market and the profit motive, we’re told, inevitably leads […]
Waitstaff 1: Bosses 0–thanks free market
Restaurant owners across the country who eliminated tipping have reversed course in droves, to the relief of their staff and the benefit of their bottom lines. As Nikita Richardson documents in Grubstreet, beginning in 2015 numerous marquee establishments from New York to San Francisco instituted no-tipping policies. While their motivations were noble–they liked the convenience […]
NPR Report on T-Shirts Exposes What Others Have Written About For Decades
National Public Radio’s (NPR) “Planet Money” team just wound up a series about what goes into making a t-shirt, which I caught on my evening commutes. It followed the t-shirt from the fields where the cotton was grown, to where it was spun in Colombia, to the factory in Bangladesh where it was stitched together. […]