Book Reviews – August 2006

• Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WW II Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan
  by A. C. Grayling
  Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling

• How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution
  
  by Richard A. Epstein Reviewed
  by George C. Leef

• Saving Our Environment from Washington

  by David Schoenbrod Reviewed by Jane S. Shaw

• The Quotable Mises

  Edited by Mark Thornton Reviewed by William H. Peterson

The Jewel of Consistency

The acid test is that a man live by the principles he professes to believe.

Ludwig von Mises: The Political Economist of Liberty, Part 1

Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE. Over a professional career that spanned almost three-quarters of the twentieth century, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises was without any exaggeration one of the leading and most important defenders of economic liberty. The ideas of individual freedom, the market economy, and limited government that he defended in [...]

The Function of The Freeman

On the positive side, of course, our function is to expound and apply our announced principles of traditional liberalism, voluntary cooperation, and individual freedom. On the negative side, it is to expose the errors of coercionism and collectivism of all degrees—of statism,“planning,” controlism, socialism, fascism, and communism. We seek, in other words, not only to [...]

To Own or Be Owned: That Is the Question

In coming months, and probably years, President Bush’s “Ownership Society” proposals—in particular, his plans for personal accounts within Social Security, health savings accounts, and more school choice—will stimulate national discussion in directions politicians for decades have feared to tread. Whether you think the President’s specifics have merit or not, this development should be seen as [...]

Government Should Fund Science?

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist, is beside himself because the 2005 federal budget contains a 2 percent, or $105 million, cut for the National Science Foundation (NSF). As W. S. Gilbert would say, “Oh, horror!” This, Friedman predicted in his December 5, 2004, column (“Fly Me to the Moon”), will condemn [...]

Why Socialism Is Impossible

In the nineteenth century, critics of socialism generally made two arguments against the establishment of a collectivist society. First, they warned that under a regime of comprehensive socialism the ordinary citizen would be confronted with the worst of all imaginable tyrannies. In a world in which all the means of production were concentrated in the [...]

The Progressive Era’s Derailment of Classical-Liberal Evolution

Fred Smith is president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. It is true that where a considerable part of the costs incurred are external costs from the point of view of the acting individuals or firms, the economic calculation established by them is manifestly defective and their results deceptive. But this is not the outcome of [...]