World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

The list of complaints against laissez-faire capitalism is long, including such contradictory notions as its guilt in impoverishing the masses and its role in enabling the poor to escape their “proper” station in life. In World on Fire, Amy Chua adds to the list, arguing that capitalism, when combined with democratization in economically developing nations, [...]

Friedrich Hayek

In this first full-length biography of Friedrich Hayek—economist, thinker, Nobel laureate, and political philosopher of the rule of law, liberty, and limited government—Alan Ebenstein offers a veritable intellectual travelogue of Hayek’s journey through life. As a student, we learn, Hayek was mildly socialist. However, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises’s devastating critique, Socialism(1922), “fundamentally altered [his] [...]

Nuclear Energy Should Be Subsidized?

In a March 5 Los Angeles Times op-ed, “Jump-starting Nuclear Energy,” Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore, who now co-chairs the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, lauds the Obama administration for its decision to “guarantee loans for two advance-design nuclear plants in Georgia.” Nuclear energy diversifies our energy portfolio and doesn’t pollute the air the way fossil [...]

The Dangers of the Myth of Merit

In his various chapters and essays on the “mirage” of the concept “social justice,” F. A. Hayek makes a claim that is very often overlooked by those who support the market. He argues that markets generally do not reward “merit.” That is, the people who become wealthy in the marketplace do not do so, for [...]

The Dynamics of Disintervention

1) government interventions into the market process tend systematically to generate unintended consequences; 2) many of these unintended consequences frustrate the announced goals of those who support the interventions; 3) the response to these frustrated intentions tends strongly in the direction of further intervention; 4) the economic system performs less effectively in coordinating the plans of buyers and sellers as it becomes burdened with the cumulative effects of an increasingly chaotic mix of interventions; and 5) the process comes to an end when these cumulative effects result in a major system-wide crisis and public choosers decide to reject interventionism in favor either of comprehensive planning or radically freer markets.

Bless the Speculators

“I believe there needs to be a thorough and complete investigation of speculators to find out whether speculation has been going on and, if so, how much it has affected the price of a barrel of oil. There’s a lot of things out there that need a lot more transparency and, consequently, oversight.” Those are [...]

The Pretense of Regulatory Knowledge

Advocates of the free market are sometimes parodied for their seemingly all-purpose answer to any problem: Let the market handle it. What may sound like a simplistic answer, however, is actually the most complex prescription imaginable. In the modern world, the workings of any particular market are so complicated, they are beyond the grasp of [...]

Book Reviews – July 2008

• A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark Reviewed by Gene Callahan
• Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don’t by John Lott Reviewed by Robert P. Murphy
• Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval that Inspired America’s Founding Fathers by Michael Barone Reviewed by Martin Morse Wooster
• Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning America Into a Nation of Children David Harsanyi Reviewed by George Leef

Class Struggle Rightly Conceived

Karl Marx is famous for drawing attention to the idea of class struggle. Yet remarkably in 1852, historian David Hart recounts, Marx wrote, “[A]s far as I am concerned, the credit for having discovered the existence and the conflict of classes in modern society does not belong to me. Bourgeois historians presented the historical development [...]