Free Republic

Blockchain technology has been the talk of the tech world for the last several years. That said, it is also something of a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. There are plenty of great books that effectively promote it, such as Don and Alex Tapscott’s nearly canonical Blockchain Revolution, published in 2016. Fast forward the revolution by two years. There’s more to say. George Gilder, in the most important recent book on blockchain, is here to say it. He not only dazzles but demystifies the blockchain, making vivid exactly how it is going to transform the internet and...

Google’s security foibles, its “aggregate and advertise” model, its avoidance of price signals, its silos of customer data, and its visions of machine mind are unlikely to survive the root-and-branch revolution of distributed peer-to-peer technology, which I call the “cryptocosm.” Today, all around us, scores of thousands of engineers and entrepreneurs are contriving a new system of the world that transcends the limits and illusions of the Google realm. In the Google era, the prime rule of the Internet is “Communications first.” That means everything is free to be copied, moved, and mutated. While most of us welcome “free” on...

Bill Gates famously called George Gilder "very stimulating even when I disagree with him, and most of the time I agree with him." The issues on which Gilder has staked out stimulating positions over more than 30 years as a writer and public intellectual are wide-ranging. They include the causes of poverty and the creators of wealth; the consequences of modern feminism; and the possibilities opened by the high-tech revolution. His arguments are often surprising, always provocative and generally controversial. His latest book is titled "The Israel Test." Much of what he says is dramatically different from what just about...

Anti-Semitism is essentially hatred of capitalism and excellence. An NRO Q&A Would you pass it? Kathryn Jean Lopez sat down with George Gilder, author of The Israel Test, and asked him a few questions about Israel. KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What’s the Israel Test and who is administering it? GEORGE GILDER: Do you admire and emulate excellence and accomplishment, even if it excels your own? Or do you envy and resent it? And try to tear it down? That’s the Israel Test and it is administered by cosmic law — the law of capitalist success: The good fortune of others is...

Charles Murray, no slouch among public intellectuals, described him as the most underrated public intellectual in America today. Murray offered this assessment of George Gilder at a recent American Enterprise Institute colloquium to discuss Gilder's newest book, "The Israel Test." Murray explained: From Gilder's national debut with "Sexual Suicide" (later reissued as "Men and Marriage"), to his seminal "Wealth and Poverty," to his farsighted "Microcosm," Gilder makes being ahead of his times look easy. And, Murray noted with admiration, Gilder has always been right. Is Gilder underrated? Yes, because his gifts and contributions deserve more or less full-time celebration. After...

Bachelorhood And Its Discontents by Christopher Orlet (July 2008) Leibniz never married. He had considered it at the age of fifty; but the person he had in mind asked for time to reflect. This gave Leibniz time to reflect, too, and so he never married. — Bernard Fontenelle In a 1994 New Yorker piece commenting on a report that the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser had strangled his wife to death, the pseudoprofound literary critic George Steiner pondered why it should have taken the Marxist philosopher so long to do the old biddy in. “Perhaps philosophers should strangle their wives,” wrote...

I seem to have got myself elected to the post of NR’s designated point man against Creationists.* Indignant anti-Creationist readers have urged me to make a response to George Gilder’s long essay “Evolution and Me” in the current (7/17/06) National Review Well, I'll give it a shot. I had better say up front that I am only familiar with George’s work — he has written several books, none of which I have read, I am ashamed to say, since I know he has read one of mine — in a sketchy and secondhand way, so what follows is only a...

Once-prestigious economists such as Paul Samuelson and once-responsible analysts such as Paul Krugman and once-sensible financial pundits such as Lou Dobbs are adducing twisted new theories of how free trade is no longer a win-win proposition.

Get Lucky by Jonathan Chait Post date 12.17.02 | Issue date 12.23.02 One of the things that has fascinated me about The Wall Street Journal editorial page is its occasional capacity to rise above the routine moral callousness of hack conservative punditry and attain a level of exquisite depravity normally reserved for villains in James Bond movies. To wit, a recent lead editorial titled "THE NON-TAXPAYING CLASS." A reader unfamiliar with the Journal's editorial positions might read this headline and assume it refers to ultra-wealthy tax dodgers. But no--the Journal, of course, approves of such behavior. The non-taxpayers it denounces...