Finally…

An economist publicly says something I’ve thought for more than a decade:

Paul Krugman, very sadly, no longer even pretends to reason like an economist.  He instead reasons as if he’s a 19-year-old cultural-studies major.

–Don Boudreaux, Cafe Hayek, Krugman Flunks Basic Labor Economics

“How the West (and the rest) Got Rich”

That’s the title of an excellent essay in today’s Wall Street Journal by Deirdre McCloskey.

The answer, in a word, is “liberty.” Liberated people, it turns out, are ingenious. Slaves, serfs, subordinated women, people frozen in a hierarchy of lords or bureaucrats are not.