Happy New Year! Welcome back to Fraser Insight, the Fraser Institute’s U.S. newsletter.

This issue of Insight is highlighted by our In Print section, which features a number of commentaries, op-eds and blogs joining in the climate-change debate, plus a podcast discussing the minimum wage.

Our In Focus section, which always showcases in-depth research and analysis, includes the latest Human Freedom Index (the U.S. ranks a disappointing 15th) and two new installments of the Fraser Institute’s Essential Scholars series: one focused on economist Ronald Coase and one focused on key Enlightenment thinkers.

Finally, our In Context section provides highlights of the record-setting year in outreach, studies and publications our research team just completed.

We encourage you to share Insight with friends and colleagues by inviting them to sign up for Insight here. Visit our website, which serves as a storehouse for cogent commentary and in-depth analysis—all from a free-market perspective. Follow us on Twitter. Join us on Facebook. And check out the In Touch section for more contact info.

Relying on unrealistic assumptions, governments want to force the transition from fossil fuels to “renewables” with undue haste.

George Mason University economics professor Don Boudreaux visits the Fraser Forum to discuss the minimum wage, the morality behind the concept, and both its intended and unintended consequences.

Will President Biden’s fiscal plan instantly transform the U.S. into a European-style laggard? No. But the U.S. is already drifting in that direction, thanks to an aging population and poorly designed entitlement programs.

The public should know that the temperature and emission goals emanating from the Paris Agreement and the recent COP26 climate conference are nowhere near justified in the standard literature. According to William Nordhaus’ 2018 Nobel Prize-winning model, trying to meet these targets would have a worse impact on humanity than doing nothing at all about climate change.

As European governments cut their reliance on natural gas and other fossil fuels, energy prices are predictably shooting up.

It’s probably not the case that environmentalists dream of a future where the world is under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party and its coal-powered Belt and Road network, but that’s what their irresponsible and radical activism is bringing about.

While Marx believed the end of capitalism would come in the form of a working-class revolt due to capitalism’s failures, Schumpeter instead believed that capitalism’s successes would eventually destroy the system from within—a prediction that looks to be coming true more rapidly than ever.

There’s a risk that new infrastructure spending financed by yet more debt could increase inflationary pressures in the future. Once the spending is approved, infrastructure programs will compete with other government spending and private-sector projects, bidding up material and labor costs.

The 2021 Human Freedom Index finds that even before COVID—and the response from governments worldwide—global freedom was on the wane. From 2008 to 2019, 83 percent of the world’s population experienced a decline in freedom, the HFI reveals. Switzerland tops this year’s index, followed by New Zealand, Denmark, Estonia and Ireland. Canada is tied with Finland for sixth place. The United States comes in at 15th (tied with Germany and Japan). Other nations of note: Britain (14th), Taiwan (19th), Chile (28th), Brazil (78th), Mexico (93rd), India (119th), Russia (126th) and China (150th). The five least-free countries are (in descending order) Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Venezuela and Syria. The index measures personal freedom (the rule of law, safety and security, identity and relationships, freedom of movement, speech, assembly and religion) alongside economic freedom (the ability of individuals to make their own economic decisions).

The political ideas that fully came together under the name “liberal” in the early 19th century—the ideas we often now refer to as “classical liberalism”—emerged out of major debates and developments from the late 1600s to the late 1700s, as part of the broad European intellectual movement of that era that came to be known as the Enlightenment. This volume shows how the Enlightenment and the development of liberal ideas were woven together by exploring three defining figures of the era: Baruch Spinoza (mid-1600s), the Baron de Montesquieu (mid-1700s) and Immanuel Kant (late 1700s). Both Spinoza and Kant were concerned with fundamental philosophical questions about what we could know about God, morality, the nature of the world, and humanity’s place in it. Montesquieu wrote almost nothing about such questions, drawing instead from global history and comparative law.

Nobel laureate Ronald Coase was one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. His influence is due largely to two publications: “The Nature of the Firm” (1937) and “The Problem of Social Cost” (1960). These two articles are among the most-cited works in economics. The ideas Coase developed in these two works led to entirely new fields of inquiry in economics, law, management and political science. In conjunction with his 1959 article on using markets to allocate radio spectrum, these ideas spawned new market-design theory and practice that helped to transform our society and enable innovation and digitization.

Even amidst less-than-ideal circumstances, the men and women of the Fraser Institute delivered impressive outputs in the past year. We published 91 research-intensive studies and more than 400 op-eds and columns. Our research was cited in more than 10,000 news stories, and we reached some 27 million people via our various social media platforms. There’s much more to come in the year ahead. If you’re interested in supporting our work, there are lots of ways to contribute: Donate online, call us at (800) 665-3558 ext. 579, set up an automatic monthly donation or mail a contribution the old-fashioned way. With your support, we look forward to another high-impact year.