Archive for Richard M. Ebeling

Richard Ebeling teaches economics at Northwood University and is a former president of FEE.

Economics as Ideology: Keynes, Laski, Hayek, and the Creation of Contemporary Politics

Why do people hold the views that they do, including and especially their political and ideological views? That question has generated a vast library of what has generally come to be called “psychobabble,” wherein the author attempts to “deconstruct” his biographical subject and demonstrate why the subject’s upbringing and social circumstances made him the way [...]

20Oct2011 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued

Vienna and Chicago: Friends or Foes? A Tale of Two Schools of Free-Market Economics

In the post-World War II era, two of the leading voices for a return to a competitive free-market economy have been the Austrian and Chicago schools of economics. Both schools have influenced many people about how markets work and how government affects economic affairs. To many, the Austrian and Chicago economists seem to be saying [...]

13Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

Black Rednecks and White Liberals

In a just world Thomas Sowell would win the Nobel Prize in economics. Over several decades he has applied his exceptional skills as an economist to an array of interdisciplinary studies focusing on race, culture, and politics. And in doing so he has challenged and undermined many of the dominant ideological myths of our time. [...]

13Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

Mao: The Unknown Story

In their new book, Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday estimate that under Mao Zedong’s rule in China at least 70 million people were killed in one way or another in the name of making a socialist utopia. Jung Chang was a youthful victim of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and [...]

12Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It

Alan Wolfe is a professor of political science and the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. In the pages of his new book, Return to Greatness, we learn about one of the great disappointments and frustrations of his life: “An entire lifetime can pass–my adult lifetime actually–without [...]

10Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

Wilson’s War: How Woodrow Wilson’s Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin and World War II

It is difficult for many of us to understand the almost euphoric enthusiasm with which millions of Europeans marched off to war in the summer of 1914. For almost a century the people of Europe had, in general, lived through an amazing time in which living standards for practically everyone reached heights never before known [...]

9Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 3 comments | Continued

The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia

Throughout the 1930s the propaganda machines of the Nazi and Soviet regimes did all in their power to insist that they were ideological enemies, diametrically opposed to each other in every conceivable way. There were critics of totalitarianism who emphasized the similarities in the two systems, but theirs was a minority view among many intellectuals, [...]

9Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued

The Universal Hunger for Liberty: Why the Clash of Civilizations Is Not Inevitable

The free society is a frail and demanding institutional order. It requires that men resist the temptation to violate the freedom of others who may act and speak in disagreeable or fundamentally wrong ways. It is far easier to advocate or use force to prevent them from doing so. To get others through noncoercive means [...]

8Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued

Understanding the Process of Economic Change

In the late 1980s, as the Soviet empire began to collapse in central Europe, a burning policy issue emerged: how to transform socialist economies into functioning market-oriented societies. As this discussion developed, it was astounding to discover how little the economics profession was able to contribute. For example, at an annual meeting of the American [...]

8Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

The Roads to Modernity: the British, French, and American Enlightenments

In 1945, Austrian economist F. A. Hayek delivered a lecture on what he called “Individualism: True and False.” The gist of his argument was that there had been a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding concerning the relationship between the individual and society, both in terms of social theory and practical politics. He juxtaposed what [...]

7Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 2 comments | Continued

Gulag: A History

Siberia. The word has had a chilling connotation for people around the world for 200 years. Long before Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, the tsarist regime had used the vast area that stretches from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific and Arctic Oceans as a place of exile and forced labor [...]

7Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued

Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media . . .

In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith explained the three forces at work against the establishment and maintenance of economic freedom. In his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith warned of the arrogance and danger of what he called “the man of system,” or the social engineer, who presumes to redesign man and society [...]

6Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

Churchill’s Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq

Americans, it is often said, are in general ignorant of history, both their own and that of other countries around the world. This lack of historical knowledge and understanding means that too many Americans cannot appreciate the context of many political events in other parts of the globe. For example, the political conflicts and atrocities [...]

5Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

The Great Chinese Inflation

Inflations have undermined the cultural and economic fabric of society, bringing social chaos and revolution. One example is the Great Chinese Inflation of the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, the destruction of the Chinese monetary system during this period helped Mao Zedong’s communist movement triumph on the Chinese mainland in 1949. In the nineteenth and early [...]

5Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 3 comments | Continued

Theoretical Visions and Economic Prophecies

B. R. Shenoy (1905–1978) was the most important free-market economist in India during the twentieth century. Throughout the long period when socialism and economic nationalism dominated public policy in India, Shenoy was a lone voice for individual freedom, limited government, and the market economy. From 1929 to 1932 he studied at the London School of [...]

2Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 2 comments | Continued

What Can Friends of Freedom Learn from the Socialists?

On March 14, 1883, a German philosopher living in exile in London passed away. When he was buried three days later in a modest grave where his wife had been laid to rest two years earlier, fewer than ten people were present, half of them family members. His closest friend spoke at the gravesite and [...]

1Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued

The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth

Benjamin Friedman is a professor of political economy and a former chairman of the economics department at Harvard University. He is also an unswerving advocate of the interventionist welfare state. His recent book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, is meant to demonstrate what is necessary to assure that the majority of the people will [...]

18May2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued
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