For years the traditional wisdom – long on tradition, short on wisdom – held that inflation protection was best provided by businesses laden with natural resources, plants and machinery, or other tangible assets (‘In Goods We Trust’). It doesn’t work that way. Asset-heavy businesses generally earn low rates of return – rates that often barely provide enough capital to fund the inflationary needs of the existing business, with nothing left over for real growth, for distribution to owners, or for acquisition of new businesses.
Monthly archives of “May 2024”
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On Free Expression
A good argument for strong norms of free expression is not that it leads to truth, but that it’s a form of system design that protects against the harms produced by small but well-organised groups that impose self-serving orthodoxies and taboos on the broader population. When that happens, you can’t challenge the orthodoxies without risking social punishment. By upholding norms in favour of free expression, however, you lower the scope and costs of such punishment.