Sublime

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent,” Keynes famously declared. Being early and right is the same as being wrong, as investors have repeatedly discovered.

technocrats, who will continue to assert that their expertise, credentials, and merit make them the morally legitimate power in the United States.

would be a mistake to assume that microfinance is the holy grail solution to the problem of global poverty, any more than is Hernando de Soto’s property rights prescription.

The thesis of this book is that the massed power of the nation-state is destined to be privatized and commercialized. Like all truly radical institutional change, the privatization and commercialization of sovereignty will involve a revolution in the “common sense” of the way the world is comprehended. Such change seldom happens in a gradual, linea

Markets always place the greatest pressures on the weakest holders. Indeed, that is part of their virtue. They promote efficiency by removing assets from weak hands.

aim higher.

Yet any sophisticated, large-scale market depends on well-designed and well-enforced rules of the game without which rampant theft, constant breaking of contracts, and the rule of the physically strongest would prevail. These rules can be boiled down to three principles: freedom, competition, and openness.

Non-monopolists exaggerate their distinction by defining their market as the intersection of various smaller markets:

A bright future