Book Reviews

How the Economy Works

This book is slim. It’s also well written, which is always a surprise when the author is an academic economist. But don’t let the concision and breezy style fool you. UCLA economics professor Roger Farmer offers a big idea that he’s convinced will reduce both the frequency and size of economic booms and busts. Unfortunately [...]

22Jun2011 | | 2 comments | Continued

How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes

Ignorance of economics is rampant. The average person believes the secret to prosperity is consumption and was often led to that fallacy by professional economists who should know better. Economic education in the universities has been as much a part of the problem as the solution, with millions of students taught Keynesian beliefs about government [...]

22Jun2011 | | 5 comments | Continued

Shakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy against the American Taxpayer

Politics has one feature that sets it apart from all sorts of voluntary action: It employs coercion. Politicians can raid the wallets of taxpayers, forcing them to part with money they would rather spend, donate, or invest according to their own desires. Much of the money thus confiscated is then spent to succor special-interest groups [...]

22Jun2011 | | 5 comments | Continued

The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from New Research on Well-Being

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . [...]

25May2011 | | 1 comment | Continued

The Politics of Cocaine: How U.S. Foreign Policy Has Created a Thriving Drug Industry in Central and South America

William L. Marcy has written an extensive and cogent historical critique of the U.S. war against the cocaine trade originating in Latin America. As the title indicates, he shows how this counterproductive war has led to a thriving drug industry in the Americas. Marcy criticizes U.S. policy for conflating the drug war and the Cold [...]

25May2011 | | 1 comment | Continued

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? How the European Model Can Help You Get a New Life

I like to compare the rival coalitions of organized capital represented by the major parties to two farmers. One farmer thinks it’s more profitable in the long run to work his livestock in moderation and feed them well. The other figures he’ll come out ahead by just working them to death and replacing them. I [...]

25May2011 | | 7 comments | Continued

Six Political Illusions: A Primer on Government for Idealists Fed Up with History Repeating Itself

You don’t believe in magic, do you? Magicians employ a variety of tricks to deceive audiences into thinking that something has happened that can’t. They are masters of illusion. Adults know that they’re being fooled when the rabbit seems to materialize out of an empty hat. Magic is harmless fun, but the government is not. [...]

25May2011 | | 1 comment | Continued

Imposing Values: An Essay on Liberalism and Regulation

Liberalism comes in two varieties, classical and modern. All liberals support limitations on government power, but modern liberalism favors, while classical liberalism opposes, significant interference with private property rights. N. Scott Arnold’s book on the classical-modern liberal debate focuses on the modern-liberal regulatory agenda, especially employment law (such as collective bargaining rules and antidiscrimination law), health [...]

21Apr2011 | | 1 comment | Continued

Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It

Congestion is five times worse than in 1995. Why? What should we do about it? Those questions drive Randal O’Toole’s Gridlock. The main reason for the increase, the author writes, is that beginning in the 1960s, “Many people looked at the costs of the automobile without considering the benefits, and their solution was to get [...]

21Apr2011 | | 26 comments | Continued

Bought and Paid For

Americans who have at least a modicum of political sophistication know that special-interest groups have enormous power to influence the political system, getting favors from government they couldn’t obtain through voluntary means. Informed people know, for example, that many farmers receive subsidies, that labor unions have privileges to employ coercion that no other private organization [...]

21Apr2011 | | 0 comments | Continued

The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion Versus Environmental Religion in Contemporary America

We all, like sheep, have gone astray. We have sinned. We must humble ourselves. We must repent and turn from our wicked ways. These are the messages of our modern-day secular religions: economic religion and environmental religion. Throughout The New Holy Wars, Robert H. Nelson uses theological reasoning to explore them. His book is an [...]

21Apr2011 | | 1 comment | Continued

The Road to Big Brother: One Man’s Struggle Against The Surveillance Society

As I write this review, millions of Americans are annoyed if not outraged over the recent measures adopted by the so-called Transportation Security Agency. Airline travelers hate the choice between going through a scanner that effectively undresses them and an aggressive grope of their bodies. Are those offensive procedures necessary? Are they legal? What is [...]

23Mar2011 | | 1 comment | Continued

Commonwealth

Some two decades after the collapse of communism, socialist intellectuals still scramble to rehabilitate Marx and collectivist social theory in general, with Duke University professor Michael Hardt and Italian sociologist Antonio Negri leading the bunch. Academics are attracted to their radical critique of existing capitalist institutions. Non-academics and educated laypersons on the left are attracted [...]

23Mar2011 | | 1 comment | Continued

The Privatization of Roads & Highways: Human and Economic Factors

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23Mar2011 | | 3 comments | Continued

Unchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy

This slim yet insight-packed volume makes fair progress toward explaining the 2008 financial crisis. The first of the book’s three chapters outlines the “housing industrial policy” that led to the crisis. The second discusses the conflict between concentrated political power and effective use of socially dispersed knowledge, and the third suggests reforms. Tracing the government’s [...]

23Mar2011 | | 3 comments | Continued

Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves

Books about the 2008 financial crisis keep coming, and New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin offers one of the better accounts of the meltdown. Using a large number of interviews, he reconstructs the words and acts of key people during the six months from the near-collapse of Bear Stearns in March to the bankruptcy [...]

24Feb2011 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Hesitant Hand: Taming Self-Interest in the History of Economic Ideas

“The focus of this book,” according to its author, “is the interplay of self-interest, market, and the state in economic analysis from the mid-nineteenth century up through the latter stages of the twentieth.” Much of this well-written study, however, is devoted to describing the intellectual origins of the approach to political economy known today as [...]

24Feb2011 | | 0 comments | Continued
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