Archive for George C. Leef

George Leef is book review editor of The Freeman.

Subsidizing More College Students Won’t Help the Economy

Governments in the United States subsidize college education heavily. State universities charge students very low tuition rates, and the federal government has a host of grant and loan programs designed to make college affordable to most families. (As politicians make those programs more generous, schools have spent more and raised tuitions, thus creating an upward [...]

29Jun2010 | | 7 comments | Continued

Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses

In his previous book, The Big Ripoff (reviewed in the June 2007 Freeman), author Timothy Carney launched an attack on two of America’s preeminent political myths—that the Democrats are “the party of the little guy” and the Republicans are “the party of free enterprise.” Both notions are useful to candidates in the endless quest for [...]

20May2010 | | 1 comment | Continued

State of Fear

State of Fear is a didactic novel, teaching while telling a story. Author Michael Crichton is attempting here to do more than just to make a general statement to the reader, such as Upton Sinclair did in The Jungle (“capitalism is bad”) or Ayn Rand did in Atlas Shrugged (“capitalism is vital”). He is attempting [...]

18May2010 | | 1 comment | Continued

They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators

What a stunning book! They Made America is a big glorious coffee-table kind of book that deserves to be picked up and read, not just dusted occasionally. Harold Evans (actually, Sir Harold—this former editor of the London Times was knighted in 2004) has given us a marvelous compendium of short biographies on American inventors and [...]

18May2010 | | 1 comment | Continued

Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 led to a gusher of books in 2009 by writers opposed to the new President’s philosophy and agenda. If you judge by sales figures, one of the most successful of those books was Liberty and Tyranny by Mark Levin, president of Landmark Legal Foundation and a nationally syndicated [...]

20Apr2010 | | 3 comments | Continued

End the Fed

Of all the blunders in American history, perhaps the greatest was the decision to put control of money and banking in the hands of a cabal of big bankers operating under the highfalutin title “Federal Reserve System.” Unfortunately, few among us know anything about the Fed, much less have any inkling of how badly it [...]

24Mar2010 | | 3 comments | Continued

Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775–1821

Most people suppose, without having thought much about it, that money must be provided by government. That belief comes in for a sound thrashing in University of Georgia professor George Selgin’s book Good Money, which tells the story of Britain’s experience with private coinage during the Industrial Revolution. Selgin’s research shows that the government had [...]

24Feb2010 | | 2 comments | Continued

The Legal Foundations of Free Markets

The Legal Foundations of Free Markets, a recent book from the veteran British free-market Institute of Economic Affairs, brings together essays by nine leading experts in law and economics that delve into the interface between the legal system and the economy. The book blends historical analysis, economics, and legal theory, yielding many penetrating insights. Each [...]

5Jan2010 | | 2 comments | Continued

Freedom in America: Is the Glass Half-full or Half-empty?

It is an age-old question of perception. Show a person a glass with some liquid in it and ask, “Is it half-full or half-empty?” The importance of the answer depends on the interests of the person asking the question. If you owned a restaurant and wanted to skimp on the wine, you would rather your [...]

5Jan2010 | | 6 comments | Continued

The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen

If you were to believe spokesmen for the Obama regime and its allied pseudo-economists, there is no tradeoff between the size of government and our standard of living. On the contrary, they would like people to believe that the bigger the government gets, the more it can “stimulate” the economy and solve all sorts of [...]

18Nov2009 | | 2 comments | Continued

The Left, The Right, and the State

The Left, The Right, and The State, a collection of 103 essays by Llewellyn Rockwell, looks at the ways both the left and right use the State to pursue their goals. Rockwell, president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, argues forcefully that our liberty and property are endangered equally by left-wing and right-wing statism. As [...]

23Oct2009 | | 4 comments | Continued

Greatest Emancipations: How the West Abolished Slavery

From time immemorial until the eighteenth century, slavery was an accepted fact of life in most of the world. It was hardly ever questioned, and there were no mass movements calling for its abolition. That finally changed as a result of the success of capitalism. Once people no longer had to labor unceasingly just to [...]

23Sep2009 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Economics

For years the series of Complete Idiot’s Guide books has been a great commercial success, dealing mostly with “practical” topics as varied as dog training and wedding planning. Useful to be sure, but not exactly intellectually stimulating. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Global Economics, by economist Craig Hovey and former FEE staff member Gregory Rehmke, [...]

19Aug2009 | | 5 comments | Continued

Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World

Timothy Brook has written a fascinating work on the pivotal seventeenth century, one that defies neat categorization. It isn’t a history per se, although it is about a crucial period of history. It isn’t really about economics, but it conveys a considerable amount of economic understanding. Nor is it a work on philosophy, even though [...]

11Jun2009 | | 1 comment | Continued

Inclined to Liberty: The Futile Attempt to Suppress the Human Spirit

Some people, writes Louis Carabini, are naturally “inclined to liberty.” That is, their thoughts revolve around voluntary action to accomplish their objectives and solve problems. As a Freeman reader, you are probably such an individual. On the other hand, there are many others who are instinctively drawn to coercion to accomplish their objectives and solve [...]

21May2009 | | 0 comments | Continued

Higher Education in America: Individualism or Central Planning?

In education individual decisions are determinative. Each person (for children, with the assistance of parents) is able to choose the best kind and the ideal duration of education. That is why it’s foolish to talk about the “national education level” as too low or too high. There is no “national level.” If any individual should decide that he would benefit from more education, he will act accordingly. There is no more need for government action here than on the “national fitness level” or “national artistic level.”

21May2009 | | 3 comments | Continued

Mr. Market Miscalculates: The Bubble Years and Beyond

Veteran financial writer James Grant describes himself as a “Grover Cleveland Democrat”—that is, someone who believes strongly in sound money, free trade, and very limited government. Mr. Market Miscalculates is a collection of his essays published in “Grant’s Interest Rate Observer” over the last decade. While most financial writers credulously accept the notion that central [...]

24Apr2009 | | Comments Off | Continued
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