Karl Marx, notes Robert Bellafiore at Commonplace, once admitted that capitalism had built wonders greater than the Egyptian pyramids. This sheer power to get things done and make life better, writes Bellafiore in his review of John Cassidy’s Capitalism and its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI, helps explain its uncanny ability to shrug off continuous attacks and recover from its recurring crises.

Blueprint for Alberta?
Writing in Jewish World Review, Frederic Fransen reminds Americans of a key lesson from Revolutionary War-era pamphleteer Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. “The colonies need to declare independence,” Fransen summarizes Paine, “because so long as their goal was seen as reconciliation, foreign governments would consider the Americans as rebels and the conflict an internal affair.” But a unilateral declaration of independence, Fransen notes, instantly converts mere complaints from an aggrieved group into a negotiation between sovereign states.


