Book Reviews
New Threats to Freedom: From Banning Ice Cream Trucks in Brooklyn to Abandoning Democracy Around the World
New Threats to Freedom, edited and introduced by HarperCollins’s executive editor Adam Bellow, is an ambitious anthology. Its premise: The twentieth century faced unique threats to freedom, such as communism and fascism, and the 21st century equally confronts unique challenges to the preservation of freedom. Thirty renowned authors examine 30 of those “threats,” which include [...]
4Jan2012 | Wendy McElroy | 3 comments | ContinuedLibertarianism, from A to Z
Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron’s primer on libertarian thought proceeds just as the title indicates: a collection of alphabetically arranged short essays on 105 topics. This is a more effective technique than one might imagine: Since many people unfamiliar with libertarianism approach it by way of specific questions and challenges, Miron provides answers. Readers of [...]
4Jan2012 | Aeon J. Skoble | 3 comments | ContinuedThe Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism
What do the following have in common: hungry Venezuelans, starving North Koreans, ecological devastation in the former Soviet Union, and functionally illiterate students in Washington, D.C., high schools? Give up? They are all consequences of socialism. In his book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism, economics professor and National Review editor Kevin Williamson gives the [...]
4Jan2012 | George C. Leef | 4 comments | ContinuedFreefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy
In 2001 Joseph Stiglitz was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics, a fact prominently noted on the dust jacket of Freefall, his book on the financial crisis. In 2002 Stiglitz and two coauthors produced a report, commissioned and published by the government-sponsored housing agency Fannie Mae, stating that the risk of a failure by [...]
4Jan2012 | Lawrence H. White | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Pursuit of Justice: The Law and Economics of Legal Institutions
Public Choice analysis is the application of economic reasoning—principally the idea that human action is primarily self-interested—to questions drawn from politics and government. It was famously described by James Buchanan as “politics without romance.” To date most Public Choice research has focused on the behavior of political actors. Less attention has been paid to the behavior [...]
30Nov2011 | Michael DeBow | 18 comments | ContinuedPearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy
For decades the prevailing view among historians has been that because the American people were too stubborn and stupid to concern themselves with foreign wars, President Franklin Roosevelt had to lie for a noble cause—namely, waging war against imperialist Japan and Nazi Germany. Seldom have historians asked themselves why Americans would want to stay out [...]
30Nov2011 | Jim Powell | 5 comments | ContinuedBack on the Road to Serfdom: The Resurgence of Statism
Since the housing bubble burst in 2007, America’s social and economic troubles have mounted rapidly. Unemployment remains high, saving and investment low. The federal government is desperate to suck in enough money to pay its enormous tab for welfare and warfare a bit longer. Our politics have become increasingly vicious. About two-thirds of the people [...]
30Nov2011 | George C. Leef | 2 comments | ContinuedCrisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm’s book on the great subprime crisis gets off to a good start by dismissing as a red herring the “tired” argument attributing the boom to “greed” and focusing instead on “changes in the structure of incentives . . . that channeled greed in new and dangerous directions.” These included programs [...]
30Nov2011 | George A. Selgin | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism
The eminent UCLA historian Joyce Appleby concludes The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by referring to the persistent nostalgia for socialism: “As one sufferer from Yugonostalgia explained it, ‘in Yugoslavia people had fun. It was a system for lazy people; if you were good or bad, you still got paid. Now, everything is about [...]
26Oct2011 | Leonard P. Liggio | 2 comments | ContinuedAlchemists of Loss: How Modern Finance and Government Intervention Crashed the Financial System
The subprime crisis and financial meltdown have spawned dozens of books, some aimed at re-enshrining John Maynard Keynes, others at laying him to rest once more; some aimed at praising the Federal Reserve for staving off another Great Depression, others at blaming it for treating the economy to another cyclical episode. In Kevin Dowd and [...]
26Oct2011 | Roger W. Garrison | 0 comments | ContinuedA Maverick’s Defense of Freedom
The Liberty Fund catalog is filled with excellent books on American history, economics, and philosophy. As a Public Choice economist I have benefited tremendously from its publication of the collected works of James Buchanan. While I already owned several of his books, the opportunity to purchase all his books and articles at once saved me [...]
26Oct2011 | Joshua C. Hall | 0 comments | ContinuedLibertarianism Today
Libertarianism is attracting more attention than ever. As the economic and social damage done by Leviathan increases exponentially Americans are coming to understand that government power is the root of our many troubles. The idea that a consistent philosophy based on freedom and peaceful cooperation among all people is the only path out of the [...]
26Oct2011 | George C. Leef | 5 comments | ContinuedEconomics 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 | ContinuedGreat Wars & Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal
Essential to the maintenance of support for the government (almost any government, any time) is the idea that the nation’s wars have been just and heroic, and that the leaders who presided over them were great men. Ugly truths about those wars and leaders are routinely swept under the rug. Court historians (and yes, democracies [...]
21Sep2011 | George C. Leef | 24 comments | ContinuedThe Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature
Timothy Ferris is a prolific bestselling author of 12 books on cosmology, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the recipient of several awards for popular science writing. The Science of Liberty is a welcome treatment of a subject often and regrettably neglected by intellectual historians in the social sciences. [...]
21Sep2011 | William N. Butos | 2 comments | ContinuedNullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century
How can Americans restrain an out-of-control federal government that won’t recognize any constitutional limits on its power? In Nullification: How to Resist Tyranny in the 21st Century, Thomas Woods argues that state invalidation of federal laws could be the answer. First, though, Woods identifies what almost certainly won’t work: trying to effect change by sending [...]
21Sep2011 | Jacob H. Huebert | 26 comments | ContinuedThe Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective
This collection of essays tries to trace the influence, define the ideology, and question the validity or propriety of the philosophy known as “neoliberalism.” The book is structured around the notion that this term can be fruitfully defined as the ideas promoted by the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS). The MPS was an organization of academics [...]
21Sep2011 | Brian Doherty | 2 comments | Continued-
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