Hoover Institution
The Hoover Institution shares videos intended to encourage discussion, generate ideas, and disseminate information related to peace, the human condition, and the role of government.
Mont Pelerin Society Organized Classical Liberalism Against Postwar Planning
Hoover Senior Fellow John Taylor recounts the Mont Pelerin Society’s 1947 founding as an organized response to the postwar rise of socialist planning and state intervention. In Taylor’s telling, Friedrich Hayek and the society’s first members were not simply defending markets in economic terms; they were trying to rebuild classical liberalism as an intellectual program for freedom, aimed at the practical policy questions that had made collectivism newly credible.
Noncompete Enforcement Reduces Mobility and Innovation Despite Firm Investment Claims
Economists Steven Davis and Evan Starr examine whether states should enforce noncompete agreements, a contract tool Starr says now reaches well beyond executives and trade-secret holders to low-wage workers, interns, and janitors. Starr argues the evidence points to weak worker consent, continued use of unenforceable clauses, and lower innovation where noncompetes are enforced; Davis presses the countercase that some clauses may protect legitimate firm investments in training, clients, or confidential information. Their disagreement centers on whether law can distinguish those uses cheaply enough, or whether broader bans and bright-line rules are the better response.
U.S. China Policy Needs a Unified Economic Statecraft Command
Elizabeth Economy’s conversation with Randy Schriver and Mike Kuiken of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission argues that Washington’s China problem now cuts across trade, technology, supply chains, cyber operations, Taiwan planning, pharmaceuticals, and sanctions policy. Schriver and Kuiken say the US government still manages many of those risks through agencies and laws built for an earlier era, leaving economic statecraft fragmented just as China’s leverage has become more integrated. Their case is less for severing all economic ties than for building the machinery to decide which ties are tolerable, which are dangerous, and which require national effort to replace.
Deterring China Over Taiwan Requires Options Short of War
Eyck Freymann’s argument in Defending Taiwan, discussed with Niall Ferguson at the Hoover Institution, is that U.S. deterrence is too narrowly built around stopping a Chinese invasion. Freymann says Beijing could instead use customs controls, coast guard pressure, energy constraints, supply-chain leverage, and political coercion to force Taiwan toward submission without triggering a clear war. His prescription is for Washington to build credible options between inaction, military escalation, and an economic rupture it cannot sustain.