The Great Society’s War on Poverty

For the most part President Lyndon B. Johnson was simply lucky in regard to economic stability and growth during his term in office, although he does deserve credit for pushing John F. Kennedy’s stalled tax-cut proposal to quick enactment in February 1964. The economy was already growing and the rate of unemployment declining when LBJ [...]

Economic Analysis and the Great Society

Although the Great Society should be understood as primarily a political phenomenon—a vast conglomeration of government policies and actions based on political stances and objectives—economists and economic analysis played important supporting roles in the overall drama. Even when political actors could not have cared less about economic analysis, they were usually at pains to cloak [...]

Book Reviews – September 2007

• The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements
  
  by Lynne Viola Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
  
• In our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
  by Charles Murray Reviewed by Michael Tanner
  
• Actual Ethics
  by James R. Otteson Reviewed by Tibor Machan
  
• Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History
  by Paul Moreno Reviewed by George C. Leef
  
1Sep2007 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | Continued

The Never-Ending Welfare Debate

Norman Barry, a contributing editor of Ideas on Liberty, is professor of social and political theory at the University of Buckingham in the UK. He is the author of An Introduction to Modern Political Theory (St. Martin’s Press). After a long struggle, a “revolutionary” welfare reform bill, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act [...]

Global Interventionism and the Erosion of Domestic Liberty

Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. “Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provision against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.” —James Madison to Thomas Jefferson May 13, 1798 There is a tendency of [...]

Civil Rights Socialism

Mr. Rockwell is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. The Fabian Society of Britain believed in three central doctrines of political economy. First, every country must create its own form of socialism. Second, socialism imposed slowly is more permanent than the revolutionary form. and third, socialism is not likely to succeed [...]