More than fifty years ago the distinguished Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek in his brilliant book The Road to Serfdom wrote the following statement: “The coming of socialism was to be the leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. It was to bring ‘economic freedom,’ without which the politi­cal freedom already gained […]

In the decade after 1958, hundreds of thousands of Cubans left Cuba. Among those who exited were many highly skilled workers who had managed Cuba’s 161 sugar factories. Although the physical capi­tal left behind remained intact, the human capital embodied in each of the emigrants was lost to the Cuban sugar industry forever. Revolutionary leaders […]

Rule by one has innumerable times been reproached for the contradiction which is supposed to lie in the purely quantitative disproportion between the one­ness of the ruler and the many-ness of the ruled. — Georg Simmel [ref]Georg Simmel, “Subordination Under an Individual,” in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free […]

The recent boom in Cuban tourism is a classic exam­ple of maximization under constraints. Hampered by the tightened U.S. embargo and by the disappear­ance of substantial economic aid from the former Communist Bloc countries, the Cuban government has exploited one of the few growth sectors open to it. Joint ventures with companies from foreign coun­tries […]