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The stakes involved in Washington policy debates are often so high-- whether we send our young men and women to war; whether we allow stem cell research to go forward-- that even small differences in perspective are magnified. The demands of party loyalty, the imperative of campaigns, and the amplification of conflict by the media all contribute to an atmosphere of suspicion. Moreover, most people who serve in Washington have been trained either as lawyers or as political operatives-- professions that tend to place a premium on winning arguments rather than solving problems. I can see how, after a certain amount of time in the capital, it becomes tempting to assume that those who disagree with you have fundamentally different values-- indeed, that they are motivated by bad faith, and perhaps are bad people.

These negative-sum games of coercion and extortion lead to highly inefficient outcomes, and they can only be avoided by carefully crafting the ex ante rules to avoid such coercion and extortion. These coercive threats that make negative-sum games possible, and that decrease the payoffs of positive-sum games, cannot be neatly distinguished in practice from innocent externalities: any act or omission of one party that harms another, i.e. any externality, doubles as a threat, whether a tiny threat or a large threat, from which an extortion premium, its size depending on the size of the threat, can be extracted. In order to try to distinguish coercion, and the extortion it gives rise to, from an "innocent" externality that can be cured by efficient bargaining, there are ways to exclude some of these extreme possibilities from the prior allocation of rights. And indeed criminal and tort law do this: they distinguish purposeful behavior from negligent, and negligent from the mere unfortunate accident. But any such ex ante distiction contradicts the claim that the Coase Theorem applies to any prior allocation of rights. Voluntary bargaining cannnot give rise to tort and criminal law. Quite the opposite is true: at least a basic tort law is necessary to make voluntary bargaining possible. Tort law (and the associated property law which defines boundaries for the tort of trespass) is logically prior to contract law: good contracts depend on good tort and property law. Without a good tort law already in place, nobody, including the "protection firms" posited by anarcho-capitalism, can engage in the voluntary bargains that are necessary for efficient outcomes. This is not to claim that the polar opposite of anarcho-capitalism must be true, i.e. that "the government" along the lines we are familiar with is necessary. Instead, a system of political property rights that is unbundled and decentralized is possible, and may give rise to many of the benefits (e.g. peaceful competition between jurisdictions) promised by anarcho-capitalism. But political property rights are not based on a Rothbardian assumption of voluntary agreement -- instead, in these systems the procedural law of political property rights, as well as much of substantive property rights and tort law, is prior to contract law, and their origin necessarily involves some degree of coercion. Political and legal systems have not, do not, and cannot originate solely from voluntary contract. Both traditional "social contract" justifications of the state and the Rothbardian idea that contracts can substitute for the state are false: in all cases coercion is involved, both at the origin and in the ongoing practice of legal procedure. In both cases the term "contract" is used, implying voluntary agreement, when the term "treaty", a kind of agreement often forced by coercion, would far more accurately describe the reality. The real task for libertarians and other defenders of sound economics and law is not to try to devise law from purely voluntary origins, an impossible task, but to make sure the ex ante laws make voluntary bargaining possible and discourage coercion and extortion (by any party, including political property rights holders or governments) as much as possible.

We Boys and Men need to know how to Love. Though It may sometimes hurt, we need to persevere and party it out.

Sec. Particulars Amount 80C Tax saving investments1 Maximum up to Rs. 1,50,000 (from FY 2014-15) 80D Medical insurance premium-self, family Individual: Rs. 15,000 Senior Citizen: Rs. 20,000 Preventive Health Check-up Rs. 5,000 80E Interest on Loan for Higher Education Interest amount (8 years) 80EE Deduction of Interest of Housing Loan2 Up to Rs.1,00,000 total 80G Charitable Donation 100%/ 50% of donation or 10% of adjusted total income, whichever is less 80GGC Donation to political parties Any sum contributed (Other than Cash) 80TTA Interest on savings account Rs. 10,000 1              Tax saving investments includes life insurance premium including ULIPs, PPF, 5 year tax saving FD, tuition fees, repayment of housing loan, mutual fund (ELSS) (Sec. 80CCB), NSC, employee provident fund, pension fund (Sec. 80CCC) or pension scheme (Sec. 80CCD), etc. NRIs are not allowed to invest in certain investments, such as PPF, NSC, 5 year bank FD, etc. 2              Only to the first time buyer of a self-occupied residential flat costing less than Rs. 40 lakhs and loan amount of less than 25 lakhs sanctioned in financial year 2013-14 Clubbing of other’s income Generally, the taxpayer is taxed on his own income. However, in certain cases, he may have to pay tax on another person’s income.  Taxpayers in the higher tax bracket (e.g. 30%) may divert some portion

So why does American health care cost so much? The main reason is that the person receiving the service is not the one paying for the service. Imagine if you could go to Safeway or Giant, fill your cart with food, and then have someone else pay for it. Obviously you would get all kinds of stuff you don’t really need. Obviously the food chain would charge whatever it felt like, and you wouldn’t care, because you would not be the one paying. Now imagine further that the third party paying for the food was itself relatively indifferent to what it was charged. It raised its money through premiums paid for by millions of customers, and it could simply pass the cost to those customers in the form of higher premiums. This would be a scenario virtually set up to ensure runaway food costs. We don’t have it for food, but we do have it for health care.

This rip-off relied on a series of blatant lies. “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your plan.” “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” “The average family will save more than $2,400 per year.” “Health care costs will decline.” “Health care premiums will go down.” “Everyone in this country will now have health insurance.” Even though Obama kept saying these things, none of them was true. These statements were simply part of the con man’s “pitch.

This rip-off relied on a series of blatant lies. “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your plan.” “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” “The average family will save more than $2,400 per year.” “Health care costs will decline.” “Health care premiums will go down.” “Everyone in this country will now have health insurance.” Even though Obama kept saying these things, none of them was true. These statements were simply part of the con man’s “pitch.” For progressives, Obamacare was a prize. The prize was control of the huge American health care system, representing virtually one-sixth of the whole economy. Obamacare put progressives in charge of more than 10 million doctors, dentists, pharmacists, nurses, and technicians and support staff. Obamacare gave progressives control of more than five thousand hospitals and almost a million hospital beds. The system included hospitals and also drug companies, insurance companies, and the producers of hospital equipment, not to mention research and educational institutions. Obamacare was a heist with a very big payoff.

When you come down to it, alignment is about helping people understand what you want them to do. Most contributors will be motivated to ladder up to the top-line OKRs—assuming they know where to set the ladder. As our team got larger and more layered, we confronted new issues. One product manager was working on Premium, the enhanced subscription version of our app. Another focused on our API platform, to enable third parties like Fitbit to connect to MyFitnessPal and write data to it or applications on top of it. The third addressed our core login experience. All three had individual OKRs for what they hoped to accomplish—so far, so good. The problem was our shared engineering team, which got caught in the middle. The engineers weren’t aligned with the product managers’ objectives. They had their own infrastructure OKRs, to keep the plumbing going and the lights on. We assumed they could do it all—a big mistake. They got confused about what they should be working on, which could change without notice. (Sometimes it boiled down to which product manager yelled loudest.) As the engineers switched between projects from week to week, their efficiency dragged.

But however determined this programme of domestic consolidation, following the Reichstag election results of May 1924, not even the votes of the SPD were sufficient to carry the constitutional amendments necessary to ratify the Dawes Plan, which included an international mortgage on the Reichsbahn. Over a quarter of the German electorate had voted for the far right - 19 per cent for the DNVP, almost 7 per cent for Hitler's NSDAP. Almost 13 per cent had opted for the Communists. The two-thirds majority would have to include at least some deputies from the DNVP, intransigent foes of the Versailles Treaty and the progenitors of the 'stab in the back' legend. So concerned were the foreign powers that the American ambassador Alanson Houghton intervened directly in German party politics, summoning leading figures in the DNVP to explain bluntly that if they rejected the Dawes Plan, it would be one hundred years before America ever assisted Germany again. Under huge pressure from their business backers, on 29 August 1924 enough DNVP members defected to the government side to ratify the plan. In exchange, the Reich government offered a sop to the nationalist community by formally renouncing its acceptance of the war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty. Nevertheless, on 10 October 1924 Jack Morgan bit his tongue and signed the loan agreement that committed his bank along with major financial interests in London, Paris and even Brussels to the 800-million Goldmarks loan. The loan was to apply the salve of business common sense to the wounds left by the war. And it was certainly an attractive proposition. The issuers of the Dawes Loan paid only 87 cents on the dollar for their bonds. They were to be redeemed with a 5 per cent premium. For the 800 million Reichsmarks it received, Germany would service bonds with a face value of 1.027 billion. But if Morgan's were bewildered by the role they had been forced to play, this speaks to the eerie quality of the reconfiguration of international politics in 1924. The Labour government that hosted the final negotiations in London was the first socialist government elected to preside over the most important capitalist centre of the old world, supposedly committed by its party manifesto of 1919 to a radical platform of nationalization and social transformation. And yet in the name of 'peace' and 'prosperity' it was working hand in glove with an avowedly conservative adminstration in Washington and the Bank of England to satisfy the demands of American investors, in the process imposing a damaging financial settlement on a radical reforming government in France, to the benefit of a German Republic, which was at the time ruled by a coalition dominated by the once notorious annexationist, but now reformed Gustav Stresemann. 'Depoliticization' is a euphemistic way of describing this tableau of mutual evisceration. Certainly, it had been no plan of Wilson's New Freedom to raise Morgan's to such heights. In fact, even Morgan's did not want to own the terms of the Dawes Settlement. Whereas Wilson had invoked public opinion as the final authority, this was now represented by the 'investing' public, for whom the bankers, as financial advisors, were merely the spokesmen. But if a collective humbling of the European political class had been what lay behind Wilson's call for a 'peace without victory' eight years earlier, one can't help thinking that the Dawes Plan and the London Conference of 1924 must have had him chuckling in his freshly dug grave. It was a peace. There were certainly no European victors.

Over time, I came to dread the parties and potlucks. Most of the people we knew had spent time on the coasts, or had come from there, or were frequently traveling from one to the other, and the conversation was always about what was happening elsewhere: what people were listening to in Williams-burg, or what everyone was wearing at Coachella. A sizeable portion of the evening was devoted to the plots of premium TV dramas. Occasionally there were long arguments about actual ideas, but they always crumbled into semantics. What do you mean by duty? someone would say. Or: It all depends on your definition of morality. At the end of these nights, I would get into the car with the first throb of a migraine, saying that we didn’t have any business discussing anything until we could, all of us, articulate a coherent ideology. It seemed to me then that we suffered from the fundamental delusion that we had elevated ourselves above the rubble of hinterland ignorance—that fair-trade coffee and Orange You Glad It’s Vegan? cake had somehow redeemed us of our sins.

That afternoon, I wrapped up my latest round of calls to agents, requesting callbacks for a part in a TV show. Thanks to my reputation, a premium cable network had contracted me for one of its racier shows about a cadre of Los Angeles party girls who travel to New York City for a bachelorette weekend. The girls go to an invite-only strip club—as one does—for its “Parade of Firemen” night. My task was to find five smoking hot actors who could be the best “firemen” in New York City

The Leckwiths were excited about the Beveridge Report, a government paper that had become a bestseller. “Commissioned under a Conservative prime minister and written by a Liberal economist,” said Bernie. “Yet it proposes what the Labour Party has always wanted! You know you’re winning, in politics, when your opponents steal your ideas.” Ethel said: “The idea is that everyone of working age should pay a weekly insurance premium, then get benefits when they are sick, unemployed, retired, or widowed.” “A simple proposal, but it will transform our country,” Bernie said enthusiastically. “Cradle to grave, no one will ever be destitute again.” Daisy said: “Has the government accepted it?” “No,” said Ethel. “Clem Attlee pressed Churchill very hard, but Churchill won’t endorse the report. The Treasury thinks it will cost too much.” Bernie said: “We’ll have to win an election before we can implement it.

By combining software with another, more readily monetized product — services, in this case — Amazon is able to efficiently extract profit from a growing, volume market. What’s more impressive, however, is that because Amazon is building primarily from either free software (in the economic sense) or software it developed internally, it is paying out minimal premiums to third parties for the services it offers. Which means that not only is AWS a volume business, it may be a high-margin business at the same time. Amazon does not break out its AWS revenues, so we’re forced to rely on estimates, but UBS analysts Brian Fitzgerald and Brian Pitz projected in 2010 that AWS’s margins would grow from 47% in 2006 to 53% in 2014. Last year, Andreas Gauger, the chief marketing officer for Amazon competitor ProfitBricks, estimated Amazon’s margins were better than 80%.

It is my opinion that though croupiers seem such ordinary, humdrum officials—men who care nothing whether the bank wins or loses—they are, in reality, anything but indifferent to the bank's losing, and are given instructions to attract players, and to keep a watch over the bank's interests; as also, that for such services, these officials are awarded prizes and premiums. At all events, the croupiers of Roulettenberg seemed to look upon the Grandmother as their lawful prey—whereafter there befell what our party had foretold.

Looking back, what seems clear to him now is that while making choices that would affect millions of people, over decades, neither he nor those around him stopped to take a longer-term view. It’s especially upsetting, he says, to recall that he and his colleagues were aware of diesel’s dangers. Concerned enough to add a nominal premium into their tax overhaul, but not enough to rethink the system they were creating. More than any one decision, it’s that short-sightedness he regrets now: “It’s a horrible thing to say, but it almost didn’t seem relevant to ask what the long-term consequences were. Didn’t seem like that’s what my job was.” In his view—and I agree—that flaw wasn’t unique to one party, or one time. Nor even one country. It’s “bound up in the nature of our politics. You’re operating one budget to the next, one election to the next,” he says. “The mistake is the way we were doing the job.

Well, you see, Mr. Cade, most of my work has lain amongst these people. What they call the upper classes, I mean. You see, the majority of people are always wondering what the neighbours will think. But tramps and aristocrats don’t—they just do the first thing that comes into their heads, and they don’t bother to think what anyone thinks of them. I’m not meaning just the idle rich, the people who give big parties, and so on. I mean those that have had it born and bred in them for generations that nobody else’s opinion counts but their own. I’ve always found the upper classes the same—fearless, truthful, and sometimes extraordinarily foolish.

The women of the Upper East Side, Dallas, Palm Beach, and even Silicon Valley all felt just a bit better about their choice in party planner knowing that they could tell the ladies at SoulCycle or Pilates that yes, the wedding is overwhelming, but at least they have that fabulous girl from Good Morning, Later helping them out, so things are under control. Those kinds of bragging rights carried a premium. In the aftermath of the Spice It Up debacle, Olga realized that she’d allowed herself to become distracted from the true American dream—accumulating money—by its phantom cousin, accumulating fame. She would never make that mistake again.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.

Manifestly, a dynastic party puts personality and charisma at a premium and policy and programme at a discount. Ideology in such circumstances is reduced to populist slogans and vacuous shibboleths. Some articles in this collection are devoted to exposing the true nature of the dynastic beast and the pitiable obsequiousness of its followers. Absence of ideology and the cult of personality entails that the adherents of a dynastic party are not wedded to it on a matter of principle or precept. A dynastic party’s members are attracted by the opportunity of accumulating largesse that it affords them. Its regional satraps are leaders wedded to the patronage system. Public resources are thus allotted not on rational transparent criteria, but to crony capitalists. Auctions are the exceptions, and arbitrary exercise of discretion the rule. The economic advantage of the patronage system is shared between the ruler and the privileged class of people. This system, it is axiomatic, is inherently corrupt but is so entrenched that what objectively is tantamount to rampant corruption, appears to the party faithful to be a legitimate mode of governance.

Free” has an incredible power that no other pricing does. The Duke behavioral economist Dan Ariely wrote about the power of free in his excellent book Predictably Irrational, describing an experiment in which he offered research subjects the choice of a Lindt chocolate truffle for 15 cents or a Hershey’s Kiss for a mere penny. Nearly three-fourths of the subjects chose the premium truffle rather than the humble Kiss. But when Ariely changed the pricing so that the truffle cost 14 cents and the Kiss was free—the same price differential—more than two-thirds of the subjects chose the inferior (but free) Kisses. The incredible power of free makes it a valuable tool for distribution and virality. It also plays an important role in jump-starting network effects by helping a product achieve the critical mass of users that is required for those effects to kick in. At LinkedIn, we knew that our basic accounts had to be free if we wanted to get to the million users we theorized represented critical mass. Sometimes you can offer a product for free and still be profitable; in the advertising-driven business model, a large enough mass of free users can be valuable even if they never pay for your service. Facebook, for example, doesn’t charge its users a dime, but it is able to generate large amounts of high-gross-margin revenue by selling targeted advertising. But sometimes a product doesn’t lend itself to the advertising model, as is the case with many services used by students and educators. Without third-party revenue, the problem with offering your product to users for free is that you can’t offset your lack of sales by “making it up in volume.