In the spirit of encouraging free markets, limited government, and individual liberty, we at CEI present the following for your viewing pleasure:

In this installment of “Fred Weekly, CEI President Fred L. Smith, Jr., discusses the importance of applying technical concepts to commercial development and vice versa. Fred explains that the feedback loop between science and commerce has been one of the greatest forces for improving human life in all of history. Watch it below:

What’s the best way to reward individual innovation? In the latest episode of “Fred Weekly,” CEI President Fred L. Smith, Jr., says that entrepreneurial organizations are generally better than political institutions at rewarding those responsible for creating value. Watch below:

With Thanksgiving fast approaching, CEI President Fred Smith gives thanks in the latest installment of “Fred Weekly” for all the prosperity and opportunity capitalism has afforded us in our Age of Abundance.

In the latest episode of “Fred Weekly,” CEI President Fred Smith discusses conflicts of interest and trade-offs in business and politics.

I forget who I’m paraphrasing here, but the two iron laws of modernity are 1) things are getting better, and 2) people think they’re getting worse. The short video at the bottom of this post is one way to prove the first law to victims of the second law. It’s a rough cut adapted from a recent talk Don Boudreaux gave; I eagerly await the full version.

When I took macroeconomics in graduate school, the professor circulated a Sears catalog from 1900 or so around the classroom. Most of the prices were given in cents, not dollars. Now imagine that you could buy anything you wanted from that catalog today at those low prices. They’re still too expensive. Take these vacuum cleaners pictured below:

$12.50 for a vacuum cleaner? What a deal! And yet, given the choice, I would not buy it. Too expensive. I wouldn’t even be willing to pay $5.00 for it. Heck, I wouldn’t even want it for free.

Why is even a price of zero too expensive for that vacuum? Because it doesn’t even use electricity. It’s manually powered. No thanks. I’m better off with the $90 vacuum I bought a few years ago.

Of course, I’ve been ignoring inflation. As a useful public service, the Minneapolis Fed has an inflation calculator right on its homepage. It only goes back to 1913, and our vacuum is a 1909. But that’s close enough for the point I’m making.

If that vacuum cost $12.50 in 1913, it would cost $285.17 in 2011. This manually powered vacuum, that I wouldn’t pay a dime for, is three times as expensive in real terms as my electric vacuum.

Things are better now. Modernity is a blessing. The first law holds. Hopefully the second law won’t prove quite so rigid.

Click here if the embedded video below doesn’t work. It’s well worth 1:26 of your time to watch.

Like other regular viewers of CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street,” I was saddened to learn that Mark Haines, the show’s longtime co-host, passed away unexpectedly last night. I’ll miss watching him on weekday mornings. I always enjoyed his direct, no-nonsense approach to interviews. Indeed, this morning, Haines’s CNBC colleague Joe Kernen said that one of the most valuable things he learned from him was not to relent when an interviewee tried to evade a question. That doggedness provided some memorable on-air moments, including this one. It gets really interesting at 4:50.

My full blog post on the above interview is here.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45eLGFepD60 285 234]

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVCROjpgCB0 285 234]

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxnvlndMyjY 285 234]