The Trump administration’s weird obsession with tariffs, which started as a serious policy that merited serious treatment, has gradually degenerated into something of a punch line among technologists and businesspeople alike over the last two weeks.

The Securities and Exchange Commission says insider trading occurs when an investor knows of ‘material nonpublic information’ and then uses that information in violation of a duty to refrain from trading or sharing the knowledge.

This thought that we should endow governance with the powers to do really useful cross-cutting strategic planning with strict conditionality.

As we all know we’re told that we should live more like Europeans. In flats. You know, stack-a-prole worker flats because that’s communal, social, and that protects our precious natural countryside.

Many people are familiar with Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (WoN), But Smith’s ethical thinking was just as important.

We do take this to be a part of how the whole capitalism, markets, technological cycle works. We have some reasonable solution to a perceived human need or want. Businesses start up to provide that solution.

I’ve just received and read The Happiness Experiment, a new book by my friend Carl B Barney. And a very interesting read it is. 

Trump is upending European security and global trade, also spooking public and private sector players with conduct seen at best as short-sighted, at worst as arbitrary and unpredictable.

Apparently we’ve one of those economic crimes calling out to the very heavens for rectification.

The old order has been swept away. Let us try something new.

The essential premise of the economic proposals of Professor Mariana Mazzucato is that if we get all those really clever people in government to really think hard and do stuff to us then we’ll be better off.

There are no permanent victories in the battle for liberty and the economic prosperity that it engenders.