Eventually, politicians sensed there would be votes coming their way if they put supposedly expert and compassionate ideas like public housing into effect. The result was that many people were displaced into worse housing than they’d previously had and those “lucky” enough to get into the new government housing projects soon found them abominable. But what about the intellectual progenitors of public housing? They suffered in no way. No professorships were lost; no reputations were damaged. If any intellectuals who had advocated “urban renewal” had any pangs of conscience over it, they issued no mea culpas.

In Intellectuals and Society Thomas Sowell essays a devastating assessment of the role that intellectuals play in modern life. Their impact, he argues, is overwhelmingly detrimental and stems from their ability to use their primary skill (“verbal virtuosity,” he terms it) to get those in power to reorganize the world in accordance with their theories about how society should function. Those theories usually entail government coercion euphemistically called “planning” or “regulation.”

When it’s good, this book is magnificent. Here is one of many excellent, quotable passages: “Intellectuals are often extraordinary within their own specialties—but so are chess grandmasters, musical prodigies and many others. The difference is that these other exceptional people seldom imagine that their talents . . . entitle them to judge, pontificate to, and direct a whole society.” That sums up the problem with intellectuals very nicely.

Intellectuals are usually so absorbed in their visions for a better world that they have no patience for the gradual change that comes through market processes and voluntary action. Why wait for “social justice” outcomes such as the elimination of poverty or the end of discrimination if the government can simply mandate higher wages or outlaw “unfair” hiring practices? Sowell acknowledges that some intellectuals understand that State coercion, no matter how splendid the intentions behind it, is counterproductive. Most of them, however, continue advocating programs built around mandates, prohibitions, and taxes. Power is their opiate.

Sowell highlights a curious feature of many intellectuals: namely, their indifference to evidence that questions the wisdom of their pet policies. Gun control is a good example. Do gun control laws actually reduce violence? A wealth of data shows that antigun statutes have precisely the opposite effect. You might expect that people who are ostensibly committed to rationality would change their minds when faced with such evidence, but that is almost never the case. On the contrary, if you challenge a pro-gun-control intellectual, you are apt to be met with condescension and invective.

It is the same with scores of other issues in which intellectuals adhere dogmatically to cherished beliefs about the benefits of government intervention, no matter how strong the case that they’re actually harmful.

There is, however, a serious flaw in the book. Although Sowell quite correctly observes that the “Progressive” intellectuals managed to embroil the United States in needless wars (especially World War I, but also other conflicts), he cannot or will not see that “right-wing” intellectuals have done similar damage by providing the rationales for our disastrous military escapades this century. Sowell doesn’t explain why the influence of interventionist intellectuals who favored war in the former era was harmful, but the influence of interventionist intellectuals who favor war today is good.

Or we might turn this around and ask why the aversion to conflict and efforts at “nation-building” that characterized Woodrow Wilson’s opponents was sensible, but when (some) intellectuals today question the same sorts of policies, Sowell regards them as blind ideologues. It is the pro-intervention crowd here that is oblivious to the consequences of their favored actions. Convincing a neoconservative intellectual that our “war against terrorism” is counterproductive seems to be on the same order of difficulty as convincing a Progressive that rent-control and minimum wage laws are counterproductive.

Aside from that serious blind spot, however, Intellectuals and Society is a sharp and enlightening book.

The political movement to ban gun ownership began in earnest in the 1970s. Its partisans relied mostly on emotional appeals rather than on any scientific evidence of the efficacy of banning guns. When the faction’s allies in organized medicine and public health began in the 1980s to publish advocacy research supportive of gun control, gun banners smelled victory.

But two parallel currents in the academy changed everything. First, as constitutional scholars began seriously to study the origins of the Second Amendment, they concluded with near unanimity that the founders meant to affirm an individual right to own and use firearms. Second, a mounting body of criminology research refuted the medical advocacy researchers’ claims that gun owners are unstable, dangerous, and generally responsible for what the advocates called the “disease” of gun violence. The two most prominent criminology scholars disputing the public-health advocacy researchers are John Lott and Gary Kleck. Hemenway directs considerable firepower toward these two, since their work seriously impeaches his own.

One section (Self-Defense Gun Use) reprises a 1997 tussle between Hemenway and Kleck in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology over how to determine the frequency of defensive gun uses. This episode, which Hemenway now revisits with apparent gusto, was made possible by the inherent difficulties in studying complex phenomena such as gun ownership and use. Both sides marshal seemingly credible arguments, and one would need graduate-level competency in statistics and econometric modeling to sort out their conflicting claims. Unfortunately, the necessary imprecision of the social scientists’ methods invite the influence of bias. And it is Hemenway’s manifest bias that most characterizes his book.

A disturbing feature is his sprinkling of bigotry between bits of science. In the first chapter he pays brief tribute to typical gun owners being over 40 and in the higher income groups—not exactly a crime-prone demographic. But then quickly come withering deconstructions of the American frontier cowboy (“a hired hand with a borrowed horse, a mean streak, and syphilis”), owners of semiautomatic guns (“more likely than other gun owners to report that they binge drink”), and combat veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (“likely to kill animals in fits of rage”).

Hemenway is faithful to the public-health creed of guns as pathogens, and his description of this model reveals much about the psychology of public-health activists. Foremost is a nonjudgmental view of human behavior. In the public-health world there are no criminals and no victims. This tenet of progressivism guides the whole public-health anti-gun movement. To acknowledge, for example, a natural right of self-defense would require validating gun ownership and use.

So it’s not surprising that Hemenway gives the public-health treatment to the seventeenth-century classical-liberal philosopher John Locke. Hemenway asserts that Locke’s natural-rights tradition provides little evidence for an individual rather than a collective interpretation of the Second Amendment. He maintains that Locke meant that “rights should be determined and disputes resolved not through private judgment of each individual backed by private force but rather by the public judgment of the community.” Thus does Hemenway in one sentence dispose of the notion that self-defense is a natural right.

Locke’s second treatise, however, is unambiguous on the matter of self-defense. True, Locke’s concept of political society requires resolution of disputes (for example, a highwayman taking a traveler’s money by guile) through the judgment of the community. But in a separate example, the highwayman tries to take the traveler’s money by drawing his sword. In this case, Locke writes, the traveler may use deadly force to defend himself against the highwayman, who has put himself into a state of war with the traveler.

Hemenway’s clear misreading of Locke is proof enough of the author’s blinding bias. It colors his science, his reading of history, and ultimately his credibility as a scientist. One need not be a scientist to observe human nature and to discern how it directs human events. Perhaps social science will someday be free of emotional warp and political prejudice. Until it is, common sense and our political tradition of freedom will serve to guide firearm policy.

This is an unusual piece of scholarship, especially in the literature on gun control. It argues strenuously that controls are unlikely to have the effects hoped for by their advocates. Yet Jacobs is not a gun devotee. It appears that he is saddened by his conclusions, that he would prefer to live in a world without guns, and that he perceives guns to have far more negatives than positives. However, Jacobs consistently concludes that essentially all currently envisaged types of gun control fail to have the desired effects.

The book begins by identifying the problem for which gun control might be the “solution.” Jacobs concludes that the key problem is violent crime, rather than suicides or accidents. Suicide is a quantitatively important issue, but suicides are not a critical factor creating a demand for gun control. Accidents with firearms are a cause for concern, but these incidents are rare and mainly affect persons who have “assumed the risk” of being around guns. Jacobs dismisses the notion that society should pass gun-control laws, knowing they will be minimally effective, simply for the sake of “doing something.”

After outlining the question to be addressed, Jacobs reviews the history of gun control in America. This is an excellent summary for those new to the subject and a useful review for others.

Jacobs then discusses the impediments to further gun control. One is the Second Amendment and the widespread belief among gun owners that it guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms. Jacobs suggests that even under an individualist interpretation of the amendment, there is still scope for regulation of firearms. But he sees the technical implications of the Constitution as less relevant than long-standing hostility to gun regulation on the part of a substantial fraction of the country.

A second critical difficulty that faces additional controls is the large number of guns in circulation. This fact, combined with the durability of most guns, implies that even if no new firearms were obtained by anyone in the United States from some point forward, there will still be a high rate of gun ownership for decades. Thus even perfectly effective controls on new ownership cannot address problems related to existing guns.

The third key impediment that Jacobs emphasizes is the multitude of mechanisms by which new and existing gun-control laws can be circumvented or evaded. Any restrictions on the sale of guns are undone to a substantial degree by straw purchases, fake IDs, gun thefts, and unscrupulous federal firearms licensees. Jacobs notes that all these avenues for circumventing control apply even if both primary and secondary purchases are subject to background checks and even if all guns are registered. The only possible mechanism for addressing the multiple opportunities for criminals to get guns is confiscation of existing guns combined with prohibition of all new guns. Jacobs dismisses that approach as utterly impractical, both because of the large existing stock of weapons that owners will give up only under duress and because prohibition will generate a black market.

Given the author’s conclusions, it might appear that gun-control opponents would welcome this book with open arms. That is not quite right, however.

Those opposed to controls will share most of Jacobs’s conclusions, and they will be pleased to see those conclusions coming from someone who is not a fan of guns. Nevertheless, opponents of gun control will find the book unsatisfying — because while Jacobs is thoughtful and persuasive in his criticism of most gun controls, his critiques are about the limits of controls rather than about the possible benefits of guns.

That approach leaves unaddressed a deeper question: would eliminating guns be desirable if the existing impediments were removed? Jacobs doesn’t answer that question, and the omission will give control opponents pause.

Can Gun Control Work? is the kind of calm, rational evaluation of public policies that is all too rare today.

The government cannot produce or purchase an infinite amount of health care. Decisions have to be made about what the right to health care includes: Does it include free visits to the doctor anytime you want? MRIs and CTs to check out every pain? Dialysis and kidney transplants for all? Free paid leave for every bout of depression? Experimental therapy? Any and all preventive screening tests? We could spend the entire federal budget on health care and not provide all of that to every American. A right to health care does not guarantee you’ll have all you might want or need.

It’s not only knowing how much to produce, but what types of things to produce. We treat K-12 education as a right and expect the government to provide it. As a result, over the last 40 years the amount of money taken by government at all levels to run K-12 education has almost tripled on an inflation-adjusted per capita basis. But national testing in math, science, and reading skills shows no improvement, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics 2008.

Clearly, while the government provides something it calls “education,” it is not particularly successful at educating students. Making central decisions on how to educate–such as the “see-say” method versus phonetics or having the same teacher for all classes versus different teachers for every subject–leads to everyone’s suffering if good choices aren’t made. There is a lesson here for the more complicated provision of health care, as we talk about “expert panels” determining “the” way to diagnose and treat various medical ailments.

Just because something is a right doesn’t mean in practice it can’t be restricted. The “right” to K-12 education doesn’t include home tutoring or guarantees of tasty lunch choices in the cafeteria. Even if health care is viewed as a right, it may not include the coverage you hope to have.

Rights Don’t Guarantee Access

The Supreme Court clarified, in the 2008 District of Columbia vs. Heller case, that the right to have a gun to protect your own home is an individual right. The Supreme Court was interpreting the Second Amendment, but the amendment had been operative for over 200 years. A right doesn’t guarantee easy access. Plaintiff Heller had to spend several years and over $1 million to clarify what that right meant. And such clarification is by no means over. While you have a right to own a loaded gun in your own home in a federal enclave like the District of Columbia, the Supreme Court has yet to rule whether that right extends to the states–whether, in the vernacular, it is an incorporated right. Chicago has a total gun ban, and it’s taken two years post-Heller for the Supremes to clarify the Second Amendment’s further extent. DC is still arguing that while people may “keep” guns in their home, post Heller, District residents may still not “bear” them, take them beyond their homes. That requires yet further adjudication. So while Americans have a Second Amendment right, and have had it for over two centuries, it’s not yet clear what is included. And of course in the future, depending on the political makeup of the Court, Heller could always be overturned, as Brown overturned Plessy. Or an amendment could be added to the Constitution to nullify the Second, as the 21st nullified the 18th.

A right to health care faces similar challenges. Getting needed care through the political process takes time. Imagine you have a disease with a cure the government thinks is too experimental, too risky, or not sufficiently cost-effective. You have a right to health care, they say, just not that health care. But you need it, so you do what is typically done to defend your rights in the United States: You lobby the government; you write letters to your congressman; you speak before government committees; you encourage friends and relatives to help; you take time off from your job to do all this. You devote your remaining time on earth to getting the coverage; you raise money for candidates who say they’ll support such coverage. And you’re successful. A decade after your quest began, eight years after you died, the government starts to cover the treatment you needed. You had a right to health care, but wouldn’t it have been easier just to buy it (even if it took some charitable donations to help you)?

The last paragraph is more than hypothetical. In April 2005 England’s National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) issued a press release, “NICE Lifts Restrictions on Access to Bowel Cancer Treatments.” It announced that English and Welsh patients could soon receive the same chemotherapy for advanced colorectal cancer that European and American patients had already been receiving for three years.

The bottom line: Expensive medical therapies are typically available in the United States years before they are available in countries with universal health care. Politicizing health care by making it a “right” simply pushes health care decisions into the political process, routinely leading to delays.

The Right to iPods?

People don’t have a right to iPods. They just have iPods. People who want them buy them. They were once expensive, but have come down dramatically in price in a remarkably short time; now much better units–more memory, more functions, smaller–cost less than half what the original units did. Some claim health care is special, that similar price drops can’t happen there. But when the market is allowed to work–in Lasik eye surgery or cosmetic surgery or when patients with health savings accounts shop around–similar price drops are seen. It’s only when third parties, like the government or large, highly regulated insurance companies, pay for health care that prices go up every year.

Is health care a right? Do we even want it to be a right? People fight about rights. Abortion has been recognized as a right since the 1973 Roe decision, but most Americans want restrictions on that right and many want it taken away. That is a risk of making things rights; rights can be modified, restricted, curtailed, or eliminated, depending on the political climate. Do we want people to be fearful that their right to liver transplants–or hair transplants–might also be someday taken away? Do we really want people feeling they must man picket lines on a regular basis to protect their “right to health care”?

Rights are like money. Both are good to have, but inflating them–believing that every good thing must be a right–makes them less valuable. Is health care a right? I hope not.

“We were what they perceived as a couple of faggots, which was the term they used, walking through their neighborhood,” he said. “And it would have been one of those modestly ironic moments if my colleague might have been murdered in a gay bashing, when he was straight.”

The threats were vivid and believable: “We’re going to kill you. They’ll never find your body.”

Palmer told his colleague to run. The thugs chased Palmer, who stopped under a streetlight and pulled out his gun.

“I did not say anything witty or clever,” he recalls. “In the movies, they say something very clever. I just said, ‘If you come closer, I will kill you.’ Very blunt. And they stopped.”

He is convinced that if he hadn’t had a gun he would be dead. Even though the legal weapon was not fired, “it did the job it was intended to do. It evened up the odds from a gang of young men who thought it would be really fun to beat to death two guys walking down the street.”

Hat tip Reason.

Does anyone still think the “war on drugs” is a good idea?

That may strike some people as an odd question under the circumstances, so let’s take it from another direction. Have you seen the news stories about the violence on the border being perpetrated by the Mexican whiskey and cigarette cartels?

No? That’s probably because there was no such violence and are no such cartels.

So why are there violent cartels in marijuana, cocaine, and heroin but not in whiskey and cigarettes?

All together now: prohibition.

“Our” Fault?

Of course the politicians blame everything and everyone but themselves for this spreading violence. “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said. “Our demand”? Including hers? “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians.” Her answer, in addition to sending the Mexican government taxpayer money, is to go after consumers of drugs and manufacturers and dealers of guns she doesn’t like.

Drug users and gun dealers are to blame for drug-cartel violence? That makes no sense. If it did, then drinkers and smokers would be creating violence, too. What’s missing?

Once again in unison: prohibition. Who brought us prohibition? Politicians. Every politician, bureaucrat, and agent who facilitates or enforces prohibition is an accomplice in the violence because he or she helps to create the conditions in which thugs have a comparative advantage in dealing drugs.

For years advocates of free trade in drugs—that is, basic rights to life, liberty, and property for drug consumers, producers, and merchants—have pointed out that prohibition, besides being an immoral invasion of liberty by the state, sets in motion a variety of concrete evils that harm innocent people. (No one has been more consistent and rigorous in this than Thomas Szasz). These evils include the corruption of law enforcement, violent crime, and the expansion of intrusive government. Besides these domestic evils, the U.S. government has alienated farmers in foreign lands by helping to destroy their crops and livelihoods. If that’s not terrorism, nothing is. Crop destruction has been a recruiting tool for guerilla organizations, while black-market profits finance them and others with malign intent.

Few listened to these Cassandras against the anti-drug crusade. Maybe people will listen now.

Government Impotence

While violent gangs that make their money selling drugs in the black market are murdering and kidnapping people, invading homes, and committing other atrocities, the politicians have nothing to say but the same bromides they’ve been repeating for years. Thinking we’re either simpletons or amnesiacs, they expect us to be comforted by their words. (Will they be right?) They promise to defeat the cartels, crack down on drug use, and disrupt the gun trade. It won’t work. It’s never worked. It can’t work. Black-market operators are always steps ahead of the plodding bureaucrats. Break up one gang and another emerges. The drugs keep flowing (there’s plenty of bribe money), and consumers will have what they want when they want it. The profits made possible by the black market are powerful incentives to keep the industry going. Government is impotent. (They can’t even keep drugs out of prisons!)

Yet the gangs could be put out of business overnight. How? By removing the criminal penalties for the production, trade, and consumption of all drugs; by bringing the black market into the open, so disagreements can be resolved through civil channels and a talent for violence is no longer an advantage; by dissolving the extraordinary profits that illegal industries always reap.

Yes, it is that easy.

People will recoil. We can’t do that! No? Then accept as normal the unspeakable violence that is starting to spread from city to city, because that is the alternative to the stubborn refusal to end the “war on drugs,” which is really a war on people. Even full police-state tactics will not be able to control it, though that won’t stop demagogic politicians from giving them a try.

The Drug War Finances Government Careers

I don’t expect the multitude of officials who depend on the drug war for their livelihoods and power to endorse an end to prohibition. They have shown themselves more than willing to accept the violence (against others) as the price of their ambition. The new threat to us is an opportunity for them to amass more power, bigger budgets, and higher salaries.

But the rest of us have no reason to support the complex of government and “private” tax-financed agencies that grow fat prosecuting this war. The worn-out rationalizations can’t stand examination. Prohibition keeps no one from getting any drug he wants at an affordable price. On the contrary, it encourages the creation of cheaper, more potent drugs, just as alcohol prohibition replaced wine and beer with hard liquor. (More bang in a more compact form.) Prohibition doesn’t keep our children safe. It makes drugs into enticing forbidden fruits and pushes the trade into less-visible channels. Drugs aren’t “dangerous,” though people are capable of doing harmful things with them—and many other things. (Jacob Sullum’s Saying Yes is an eye-opening book that I highly recommend.) Addiction is not a disease; it’s a choice.

Everything the drug warriors have said is wrong—and often a conscious lie.

Drugs are to our society what Eurasia and East Asia were to Oceania in Orwell’s 1984: a convenient conjured-up demon to justify expansion of power and the usurping of liberty—in the name of keeping us safe.

What will it take, if not the current violence from Mexico, to make people see through the scam?

Look around. It’s our self-proclaimed protectors from whom need we protection most.

Yet, all too often, students fail to apply these lessons to serious policy issues. Instead of applying economics, they get blinded by knee-jerk reactions, hysteria, or ideology, reducing serious issues to bumper-sticker slogans. Gun control is one such issue in which a serious economic analysis can provide an important perspective.

The public debate over gun control flares up following horrific incidents such as the 1999 Columbine High School shooting (15 victims), the 2005 Red Lake High School shooting (ten victims), or the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting (33 victims). Gun-control advocates immediately call for tighter restrictions or outright bans, while gun-ownership advocates begin quoting the Second Amendment to the Constitution or making claims about prying guns from their cold, dead fingers. The same arguments are rehashed, but no one applies basic economics to the issue.

Ends and Means

Let’s recognize that in all of these cases, the killers have ends, or things they wish to accomplish. Those ends are generally obvious: they want to kill people. To accomplish those ends, they begin acquiring means in advance. They buy guns, bullets, chains, locks, flak jackets, and so forth. Further, they frequently begin documenting their plans well in advance. In other words, the killers engage in forward-looking behavior.

After these events gun-control advocates generally decry the role played by guns and insist that had the shooters not owned guns, they could not have shot their victims. This is undeniably true. However, that is a far cry from claiming that without guns they would not have been able to kill their victims. These well-intentioned gun-control advocates never consider the common-sense economic concept of substitutes.

Substitutes are goods that can replace each other, or alternate means to achieve the same ends. On a cold morning I can drink hot coffee or hot tea. To get to work I can drive a car or take public transportation. For entertainment I can watch television or go out to a movie. If government were to ban coffee I could still satisfy my desire for a hot beverage in the morning. If there were no public transportation I could still get to work. If all movie theaters were torn down I would still have entertainment choices. Eliminating a single means does not eliminate the end. Further, when there are myriad substitutes to the same end—driving, taking the bus, taking the subway, riding a bike, walking, running, hitchhiking, skateboarding, roller skating, riding a motorcycle, riding a horse—eliminating a single means does not preclude the acting individual from achieving that end.

So it is with gun control and mass killing. The killers at Columbine and Virginia Tech all planned their activities in advance, acquiring resources and determining where, when, and how to strike. Had one method of killing been foreclosed to them, they could simply have found substitutes. In other words, even had they been unable to acquire guns, they still could have achieved their ends of killing their classmates and teachers.

So what are possible substitute goods available to these killers? For starters, they could have used machetes. Now, such weapons may sound exotic or hard to acquire, but they’re not. One of us grew up in a small town in Iowa, and every summer he would “walk beans.” This field labor involves several teenagers walking up and down the rows of a bean field with a “corn knife”—a wooden handle with an 18-inch blade. The boys would hack at any corn that grew in the bean field. Every teenage boy (and many girls) in the area had a corn knife.

So imagine a would-be killer armed with that kind of weapon. It would be harder for him to walk into a roomful of people, since others could overpower him. But it would be easy enough to use it and kill people in isolated circumstances—for example, in the laundry room, in the bathroom, in a library carrel. An assailant could rack up a large number of victims before anyone found out that he was on the rampage. The lack of a gun would not be sufficient to prevent a dozen or more deaths.

On a school campus a forward-looking potential mass killer could figure out a way to deliver poison into the water system, murdering a large number of people without having to resort to guns. Perhaps the easiest option involves a high-speed car. Occasionally, we read about some person who loses control of a car and hits a crowd of pedestrians, injuring or killing them. It is no great stretch of the imagination to consider that a would-be killer could do this on purpose. In fact, this could be done several times in short order, driving at high speed into a crowd outside one building and then leaving the scene in order to do it again outside another building. Campus pedestrian flows are predictable; it would be easy to injure or kill dozens of people in this manner.

Further, it is not unusual to read about car bombs and other terrorist activities all over the world. Such things occur on a regular basis, killing or wounding dozens of people. In fact, this type of mass killing occurs so frequently that we are nearly immune to news of it. By contrast, mass shootings are so unusual that we are always affected by them.

Substitutes occur not just in goods, but also in government policies. In 1981 Morton Grove, Illinois, passed a handgun ban. Partly in response, in 1982 the city council of Kennesaw, Georgia, passed an ordinance requiring every home to have at least one gun. The town substituted a mandatory-gun policy for a no-gun policy. Currently, the crime rate in Kennesaw is lower than the crime rate for its neighbors that do not have similar policies.

Given the reduction in crime in Kennesaw, it seems that criminals also recognize the role played by substitutes. When choosing where to engage in crime, criminals are apparently substituting neighboring towns, such as Marietta, Smyrna, and Alpharetta, for Kennesaw.

Underlying Concepts

Many schools have policies against firearms on campus. These policies exemplify another pair of key economics concepts: moral hazard and information asymmetry. Moral hazard occurs when one party is not fully liable for negative consequences of his actions. For example, if you have car insurance that does not cover theft, you are likely to be diligent about locking your car, parking in a safe area, or using Lojack or some other theft-recovery system. But if your car insurance covers theft, you may be less diligent, since you will get a new car if the current one is stolen.

When a school has an anti-firearm policy, the policymakers are not the ones who must suffer the negative consequences. If a would-be killer arrives at school and discovers everyone else unarmed—students, faculty, and staff—the would-be killer is likely to be successful at creating mayhem and death. Yet the policymakers are not the ones at risk. The school board passes the policy, but the school board is not on the front lines next to the students, faculty, and staff when the would-be killer arrives. This is an example of moral hazard.

Information asymmetry occurs when one party to a transaction has more information than the other party and uses the difference to exploit the other party. Suppose, for example, I have a house for sale. I want to sell it because every time it rains, the basement fills with 3 feet of water. However, no one else knows this fact, and when you make an offer on the house I neglect to inform you of the problem. Had you been aware of it you would have acted differently in our negotiation, or perhaps you would not have made an offer at all.

When an educational institution posts signs proclaiming a gun-free environment, they convey the message to students that they may have less fear of being shot. However, they convey the same message to the potential mass killer. The killers at Columbine and Virginia Tech had no fear of facing resistance by armed students or teachers because they were on gun-free campuses. The killers knew who had guns (they did) and who didn’t (everyone else), but no one else knew that. This information asymmetry allowed the killers to be far deadlier than they otherwise could have been.

So suppose these campuses had been pro-gun zones instead of anti-gun zones. Suppose the killers had faced the prospect of confronting armed opponents instead of unarmed victims. Note that this policy difference does not change the killers’ ends. However, it makes clear that the killer is far less likely to achieve those ends, regardless of the means selected. At some point, as risk rises and reward falls, even a would-be killer chooses to substitute video games and animated carnage for a murderous rampage and real carnage.

Again, we could explore the role of substitutes in the defense of the potential victims. A student with a black belt in martial arts can handle herself in dangerous situations, but the cost involves years of preparation, the expense of lessons, and the forgoing of many other activities. A student with a calculator and a notebook, on the other hand, has almost no defense against any sort of aggressor. A physically large student has certain natural advantages, but a small student is at greater risk. But for all potential victims, a firearm is a great equalizer. Whether the student knows karate, is large or small, male or female does not matter. All students can be very effective in defense with a firearm.

9/11

Let’s even consider 9/11. Several groups of hijackers had their ends and their means. They intended to hijack planes to crash them into key targets such as the World Trade Center (WTC) and Pentagon in order to cause death, panic, and terror. Unlike the hijackers, the law-abiding citizens on board those planes had no weapons. Had the hijackers faced the possibility of armed passengers, it seems unlikely that the terrorist plot would have even been carried out, much less carried out with such success.

For that matter, the hijackings of 9/11 were themselves substitute terrorist activities. In 1993 terrorists detonated a bomb in the WTC’s underground parking structure in an attempt to topple the building and cause a chain reaction, with one tall building falling against another, thereby creating maximum damage and death. The bomb detonated, but the WTC did not fall. The failure of the blast did not change the terrorists’ ends; it merely led them to consider alternate means.

As with so many other issues, the issues of mass killing and gun control can be evaluated using basic economic concepts. Once we explore the ideas of substitutes, means and ends, moral hazard, and information asymmetry, we see that economic realities arise regardless of the wishes of well-intentioned people who call for restrictions on market behavior. Gun control will not solve the problems of society. It will only lead would-be killers to use substitutes.

In the study of mass murder by governments, R. J. Rummel stands tall. His theory, which focuses on the role of the state, is a giant step forward from previous theories that examined “cultural-ethnic differences, outgroup conflict, misperception, frustration-aggression, relative deprivation, ideological imperatives, dehumanization, resource competition, etc.” Oversimplifying somewhat for now, I characterize his theory as a regime-type theory: at one extreme, totalitarian dictatorships are the most deadly; authoritarian regimes are still deadly but less so; and, at the other extreme, democracies are the least deadly.

Besides presenting a theory that puts the state at center stage, Rummel has also made two other major contributions to this area of study. First, he has attempted to make the first full accounting of twentieth-century mass murder. No earlier investigators, for example, had tried to come up with a number for total Nazi mass-murder victims because they had focused on particular groups—Jews, Gypsies, and so forth. His most recent estimate is that 262 million civilians were killed by governments in the twentieth century.

Second, using what he learned about the number of government killings, he has emphasized the importance of understanding democide (his term for mass murder of civilians by government) by pointing out that as horrendous as combat deaths were in the twentieth century, the truth is that many more noncombatants were murdered.

In this article I present an alternative theoretical approach, a property-rights theory, for understanding how governments came to slaughter unarmed civilians by the millions and tens of millions. The questions that Rummel and I are trying to answer are: First, how does a government gain the capability to murder millions of civilians? And second, what, if anything, can be done to prevent such monstrous crimes?

Rummel concentrates on the structure of government, pointing to the centralization of power in an authoritarian or dictatorial ruler as the primary problem and to “political freedom” and decentralization of power through democracy as the solutions. The property-rights approach, by contrast, points to systematic invasions of private-property rights as the primary enabling acts and to defense of those rights as the solution. My proposed approach implies that, contra Rummel, democracy is not part of the solution, but rather part of the problem, because both democratic ideology and democratic practice undermine private-property rights.

What stands out about democide in the twentieth century is not the discrete “crimes of passion,” such as the killings in Tiananmen Square, but the systematic bureaucratic killing that took place over years. Not only is this aspect of state murder horrifying to contemplate, but it also explains how the killing occurred on such a stupendous scale: Killing millions of people took a long time. This aspect of democide seems especially amenable to economic—or, more precisely, praxeological—analysis because the systematic killing took place over time, used resources, and even involved something like capital investment (for example, to build concentration camps). But mass killing is not a market phenomenon, so rather than turning to the familiar praxeology of cooperation, which starts with the mutual gains realized in peaceful exchange, we must turn to the analysis of the dark side of human action: the praxeology of aggression.

Aggression Against Property and its Praxeological Effects

Systematic aggression against property changes the time horizon for individuals. Because incentives for producing for the future are reduced, future income and consumption are also reduced, which results in a rise in time preference. Furthermore, taxation discourages time-consuming but productive efforts to earn income and encourages instead short time-horizon methods, including stealing or legally seizing goods through politics. Thus aggressions against external property are problematic in several ways.

First, such aggressions constitute a violent attack on a person through the things the person owns. When they are “legal,” then a property owner’s resistance to them will result in official violence directly against his person. This point deserves emphasis because political attacks on private-property rights have been widely glorified as idealistic and socially minded for more than a hundred years. Much as rape needs to be viewed primarily as a violent act rather than as a sex act, so aggression against property needs to be viewed primarily as a violent act rather than as a manifestation of idealism if we are to understand its role in mass murder.

Second, successful aggression against private-property rights removes the use of the property from the rightful owner’s control. Loss of property has numerous consequences, but those most relevant to democide are loss of the ability to protect oneself, as when one’s guns or other means of self-defense are taken, and loss of the ability to be productive and hence to command resources for consumption.

Third, a successful expropriation empowers the aggressor. Owing to control of the property acquired through aggression, he will probably have enhanced capability to perpetrate even more violence.

Fourth, a successful theft may reduce the incentive to acquire new property because the victim perceives such accumulation as pointless—the property will just be taken as before.

Systematic stealing disarms victims and empowers aggressors. By “disarms,” I mean not only that it takes weapons away, but also, and perhaps more important, that it takes away the resources used to sustain and defend their lives.

Precursor to Democide

Aggression against external property usually precedes aggression against persons. Moreover, aggression against external property enables aggression against persons by transferring resources from victim to aggressor, lowering the time preference of both, creating conflict where there was harmony, and so forth. Because democide usually takes place over long periods, the victims must be prevented from running away and from effectively defending themselves. Thus attacks on property are essential to a successful democide—to keep the victims helpless and foreclose their alternatives.

In the case of communism the attack is mounted not simply on external property in general—the sort of attack illustrated by a bandit raid or by income taxation—but on the means of production in particular. Ludwig von Mises’s socialist-calculation argument demonstrates that where capital is socialized, economic calculation will become chaotic. To the extent that the free-market price system is undermined, buyers and sellers find it more difficult to compare the benefits they expect to gain from trade with their perceived opportunity costs. As this difficulty increases, economic planning by individuals and business owners, and the coordination of their plans by the economic system, is weakened. At the extreme, the economy will break down altogether, and the advantages of the division of labor will be lost for the most part. This consequence alone may be enough to account for the murderous famines that invariably accompany all concerted efforts to socialize.

An attack on people’s ability to produce differs from merely stealing someone’s output for the day. A person who has lost his productive capacity has lost the ability to demand consumer goods on the market—another reason why socialism has been deadly on such a huge scale. Socialism’s victims are left without the means to draw goods to themselves to meet their basic needs. They become entirely dependent on bureaucratic distribution, which, as the calculation argument suggests, will be ineffective even if the regime intends to feed them. If the regime decides to starve them, however, it can do so with deadly effectiveness.

Another aspect of the socialization of the means of production is that everyone becomes an “employee” of the state. What jobs they may take, whether they work, their rewards and punishments—all are determined by government functionaries.

The people become slaves in fact, if not officially, but they become slaves of an unusual sort. Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains that just as socialized capital is depleted, so also socialized labor receives “lowered investment, misallocation, and overutilization.” Labor is misallocated because of the lack of a competitive market for it and the consequent absence of market prices because independent entrepreneurs are eliminated. One pictures the schoolteachers and skilled craftsmen working in the killing fields under the watchful eyes and guns of the Khmer Rouge. Labor is overutilized because with the workers’ income largely subject to the caretakers’ control, these partial, temporary owners have an incentive to use up the labor without regard for the long-term consequences. In public slavery, the worker has no resale value. In the extreme, laborers are worked to death, as many millions were in the twentieth century.

The Historical Role of Gun Control

In Death by “Gun Control,” Aaron Zelman and Richard Stevens argue that gun control has preceded all the mass murders of the twentieth century. They summarize their thesis in what they call the “Genocide formula”: “Hatred + Government + Disarmed Civilians = Genocide.” As they explain further, “When the firearms are confiscated and the defense-minded people gone, only the defenseless unarmed people remain. The third element of the Genocide formula—the only one that the people can directly control—is in place.”

This important argument fits very well into a property-rights approach to democide. I would emphasize, however, that stealing the means of production is perhaps even deadlier. People who still can demand goods on the market, owing to their ability to produce, can procure new means of defense.

The deadliest combination is gun control and socialization. Take away people’s means of defense and their ability to acquire another means of defense, and they are left truly defenseless before the power of the state.

How does a regime that ultimately rests on popular opinion get away with such horrendous actions?

Ideology holds the key.

Ideology’s role in democide must be considered carefully, however. Violators of external property rights do not always embrace an explicitly anti-property ideology, as the communists did. They were especially deadly, though, because they precisely and consciously aimed their attacks at property rights. As we examine ideologies with elements of socialization, we should expect to find some of this same lethal effect, though not as much as in outright socialism.

Attacks on property also go by other names besides communism and socialism. Militarism, which includes the subordination of private-property rights to the state’s military machine, played a deadly role not only in the Nazi regime, but also, we are learning, in Mao’s regime. Mao was willing to take food from the mouths of the Chinese people for this purpose, and he often did so. Ideologies that announce their devotion to the race, the nation, and even freedom and democracy can also result in attacks on private-property rights.

The property-rights approach to democide gains credibility when we recognize that the twentieth century, a time of such colossal mass murders, was also a time of ideological rejection of classical liberalism’s strong devotion to the protection of private-property rights—an ideological rejection, it should be noted, that was popular in all regimes by the middle of the century, even in those that were nominally committed to “freedom.” It is no coincidence, however, that the century’s deadliest regimes were explicitly socialist and featured an announced ideology of enmity toward private-property rights.

According to Rummel, “Most democides occur under the cover of war, revolution, or guerilla war, or in their aftermath.” From the perspective of the property-rights approach to democide, war plays a causal role in empowering a regime and in compromising property rights. “War is the health of the state,” as Randolph Bourne pointed out: The state gains strength, and the people who are subject to it become correspondingly weaker. During wartime we are likely to see the warfare state, swollen with stolen men and goods, commit genocide against “foreigners.” “Given his natural human aggressiveness,” Hoppe asks, “is it not obvious that [the state ruler] will be more brazen and aggressive in his conduct toward foreigners if he can externalize the cost of such behavior onto others?”

I have criticized Rummel’s theory here for putting so much stress on the way the government is structured (as a dictatorial, authoritarian, or democratic system) rather than on what the government actually does (specifically to private-property rights). Yet in his 1983 paper “Libertarianism and International Violence,” he puts great weight on economic freedom as a contributor to avoiding violence. In his 1997 book Power Kills, however, he places heavy stress on democracy (“political freedom”) and makes little or no mention of the role of property rights or economic freedom. Rummel’s enthusiastic endorsement of democracy leaves little room in particular for understanding, as I see it, how democracy actually contributes to the deadly move toward the massive invasion of property rights.

What does the property-rights theory offer that can supplement or amend Rummel’s regime-type theory?

Supplementing the Regime-Type Theory

First, focusing on the regime type is not helpful in understanding cycles of mass murder under the same regime type—for example, the peaks and valleys of mass murder by the government of the USSR, a totalitarian dictatorship from beginning to end. A property-rights approach, however, not only suggests that a totalitarian regime would be murderous but also shows where the peaks and valleys of killing will be: the peaks would correspond to determined efforts to collectivize (that is, to massive assaults on private-property rights) and the valleys would correspond to retreats from collectivization (for example, to Lenin’s New Economic Policy period in the USSR).

Similarly, in the case of China a focus on regime structure would merely indicate that it has been under a communist dictatorship for more than 50 years. A property-rights approach, in contrast, calls our attention to the significant changes in property rights in China in recent years and predicts that large-scale democide is unlikely, despite the regime type’s being nominally the same as the one during the Great Leap Forward.

A property-rights approach gives us more insight into the dynamic of how a state gains murderous strength and the people become weak, so that the state can kill so many people. If a devil asked Rummel, “How do I murder tens of millions of people?” Rummel would have to answer, “Establish a totalitarian dictatorship.” To which the devil would respond, “Fine, but how can I put myself in a position to do so?” The property-rights theory then explains that the path to mass murder and the path to a powerful centralized state are the same and that the key is to attack private-property rights.

Applying the Theory

Let’s see how the property-rights theory sheds light on a few matters.

Socialism: From the perspective of the property-rights theory, it seems clear why the greatest mass murderers were avowed socialists instead of, say, right-wing military dictators such as Francisco Franco. Attacks on private-property rights in socialist regimes were not a side effect of another goal, such as defending the country, suppressing a dissident religious group, or attacking a particular race. Such attacks expressed the socialists’ explicit and avowed ideological aim. It comes as no surprise then that the revolutionary socialists (socialists who really meant business) attacked private-property rights repeatedly in deadly waves of “collectivization,” “de-kulakization,” “Great Leaps Forward,” and so forth.

Imperialism: The property-rights theory helps us to understand how the same type of regime can behave one way at home and another way abroad. At home the regime may face resistance at every turn from long-established property-rights traditions. Abroad, the regime does not face these constraints in dealing with the “natives.”

Democracy: Where the regime-type theory holds up democracy as the solution to mass murder, war, and other types of regime violence, the property-rights theory argues that because the principle of democracy (at least in the modern sense) has nothing to do with the protection of private-property rights and in practice undermines such rights, it promotes such violence.

Regime Change: The regime-type theory has been used to justify “regime change,” a policy of sanctions, military invasion and occupation, and other means intended to change an undemocratic regime into a more democratic one. The reasoning is all too familiar: “you have to break some eggs to make an omelet.” In this case, the omelet is democracy, which it is hoped will result in less democide and a more peaceful regime, thus justifying in the long run all the short-term “collateral damage” and other destruction.

The property-rights theory encourages instead an increase in justice—that is, an increased respect for private-property rights—or, to put it another way, a decrease in robbery. Nothing in this perspective suggests that a wave of injustice, such as “liberating” a country’s population by means of “shock and awe” aerial bombardments, can serve as the path to justice. In pointing out this advantage of the property-rights theory, I do not mean to be topical in a frivolous way. A theory of decreasing mass murder that encourages mass murder has a serious defect.

Bibliography

• Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, Knopf, 2005.
• Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy: The God That Failed, Transaction, 2001.
• ———, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, 2d ed., Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006.

by Donald J. Boudreaux

Greenwood Press • 2008 • 162 pages • $55.00

Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling

In the mid-nineteenth century, French classical-liberal economist Frédéric Passy, who would share the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, predicted: “Some day all barriers will fall; some day mankind, constantly united by continuous transactions, will form just one workshop, one market, and one family. . . . And this is . . . the grandeur, the truth, the nobility, I might almost say the holiness of the free-trade doctrine; by the prosaic but effective pressure of [material] interest it tends to make justice and harmony prevail in the world.”

Alas, for mankind the triumph of free trade in the nineteenth century did not last. There was soon a counterrevolution against liberty in the forms of socialism, nationalism, and interventionism that led to the return of state planning, government control, and restrictions on international exchange in the twentieth century.

But the disastrous effects from all forms of political and economic collectivism over the last hundred years have brought about a revival of market-oriented ideas that has given a new respectability to free enterprise and free trade. General ignorance of economics and the power of special interests, unfortunately, continue to push the world back to a more protectionist path.

There are some advocates of liberty, however, who are attempting to educate the public about the benefits of free trade. One of these individuals is Donald J. Boudreaux, chairman of the economics department at George Mason University and a former president of FEE. His new book, Globalization, is an excellent exposition of the logic and benefits of free trade and an extremely insightful critique of many popular rationales against international trade.

Boudreaux reminds us of the glorious achievements of globalization in the second half of the nineteenth century and the years before World War I, and the damage done by the politics of collectivism in the first half of the twentieth century. While the period after 1945 did not represent a return to free trade, Boudreaux explains that the regime of freer trade that followed World War II greatly enhanced living standards for hundreds of millions around the globe. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, a movement toward market-oriented reforms in former communist countries and the Third World has spread the prosperity that comes from greater economic freedom, raising hundreds of millions more people out of poverty.

In clear and compelling language, Boudreaux describes the advantages of the division of labor and specialization based on comparative advantage. He reminds us that the benefits from trade come not from exports but from the better and less-expensive imports those exports enable people to buy. As a result, he demolishes the fallacies underlying people’s fears about trade deficits.

This leads him into a detailed discussion of the supposed “exceptions” to the case for free trade. Boudreaux points out that while one can make up scenarios that appear to justify protectionism, the alleged exceptions are logically flawed and historically unproven. His examples are “dumping” (the supposed selling of goods in another country below the “cost of production”) and “infant industry” policy (helping a new domestic industry with tariffs until it can compete against foreign rivals).

Boudreaux also responds to those who fear that globalization threatens cultural diversity and national identity. He shows that, in fact, not only does globalization often assist the preservation of cultures, but it also enriches each one by adding contributions from other societies.

Finally, Boudreaux turns to the institutions needed for successful globalization. These include private property, relatively unregulated markets, an impartial rule of law with equal treatment for both citizens and foreign investors, a stable and sound monetary system, and limited government with low taxes. Countries that follow those rules not only reap benefits from trade but also create a healthy climate of freedom for their own people.

If prosperity through globalization is to continue, we must all know and defend the ideas on which it is based. In Globalization, Donald Boudreaux does an excellent job in assisting us.

Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE.

Radicals For Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement

by Brian Doherty

Public Affairs • 2007 • 741 pages • $35.00

Reviewed by Bettina Bien Greaves

Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises said, “He who wants to improve conditions must propagate a new mentality, not merely a new institution.” But propagating a new mentality is not as easy as flipping a switch. It takes time; an idea that starts in the mind of one person must travel to others by persuasion—talking, teaching, writing, broadcasting, or simply by setting an example. Only if an idea gains general acceptance will it bring social change.

Brian Doherty, a senior editor of Reason, has written a “freewheeling” history of the libertarian movement developed in America by “radicals for capitalism” who have tried to “propagate a new mentality.” Doherty reports the activities of many individuals—dedicated and colorful characters all—who, each for his or her own reason, helped promote the libertarian mentality.

Doherty traces the freedom philosophy back to Jefferson and the Founding Fathers, through the philosophers and thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, down to present times. The ideas of Marx and Keynes, the popularity of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and two world wars overwhelmed the limited-government voices that survived the Depression, effectively silencing opposition to the government. Once the war ended, however, the radicals for capitalism who had opposed the New Deal and its Keynesian spending programs began fighting back.

Three books by remarkable women, published while the war was still going on, began to rekindle faith in the old American philosophy and, according to the Cato Institute’s David Boaz, can be credited with having “given birth to the modern libertarian movement.” Doherty devotes a chapter to them—The God of the Machine by Isabel Paterson, The Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane, and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

Doherty identifies five individuals as having played major roles in postwar libertarianism: Mises, the Austrian-born economist who fled war-torn Europe in 1940 after teaching and writing on free-market economics for decades and then continued his work in America; F. A. Hayek, student, friend, and colleague of Mises in Europe and author of The Road to Serfdom (1944), which created a sensation by maintaining that socialist economic planning, then popular with most nations, actually leads to fascism and Nazism, the very evils the free countries were fighting; Ayn Rand, a refugee from communist Russia who wrote the dramatic novel Atlas Shrugged—which converted a generation of young people into enthusiastic advocates of capitalism and opponents of the altruistic welfare state; Murray Rothbard, son of Jewish immigrants and an ebullient, irrepressible “radical for capitalism” who attracted many enthusiastic young followers who later became serious economists and libertarians; and Milton Friedman, also the son of Jewish immigrants and a brilliant, charismatic intellectual who had substantial political success by pushing for “half steps in the direction of less government.”

The book also covers libertarian organizations. The first organization started after the war dedicated specifically to promoting the freedom philosophy and capitalism was FEE, founded by Leonard Read. As a long-time member of FEE’s staff and a participant in Mises’s New York University seminar, I knew most of the people mentioned in Radicals for Capitalism and Doherty interviewed me when researching this book.

The radicals for capitalism Doherty writes about include anarchists, pacifists, atheists, anticommunists, draft resisters, science-fiction writers, academicians, political activists, goldbugs, religiously motivated persons, and even several individuals who tried to establish free-market utopian “libernations” outside the domain of any existing government. Radicals for capitalism also established think tanks, wrote books, published journals, gave lectures, and taught.

Financing for most of these libertarian ventures came from real-life capitalists, entrepreneurs who had acquired wealth in our relatively free-market system. Anti-New Deal businessmen helped FEE get started. Free-market foundations paid Mises’s salary at NYU, provided student scholarships, financed economics seminars, and subsidized many libertarian organizations. Charles and David Koch, whose father raised them with the idea that big government was bad government, donated millions to libertarian causes.

Radicals for capitalism undoubtedly contributed to the climate of libertarian opinion that made it possible for Barry Goldwater to run for president in 1964, and also for Ronald Reagan to run and win the presidency in 1980.

In any free society, ideas are always changing—in ladies’ fashions, lifestyles, the role of government, individual freedom and responsibility, and economic and civil rights. Doherty has written a fascinating history of how radicals for capitalism and their fellow travelers helped to “propagate a new [libertarian] mentality” in this country.

Bettina Greaves served FEE for more than four decades as a senior staff member, resident scholar, and trustee.

Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie

by Clayton E. Cramer

Thomas Nelson • 2006 • 257 pages • $26.99

Reviewed by George C. Leef

Clayton Cramer wrote Armed America as a rebuttal to former Emory University history professor Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. Bellesiles created a furor by purporting to show that, despite everything Americans are taught, firearms played a very small role in the country’s early history. Bellesiles sought to prove that guns of all types had actually been rare in the colonial period and early years of the United States.

Gun-control advocates were overjoyed. The book was given glowing reviews in all the important places and won the illustrious Bancroft Prize awarded by Columbia University. Its many champions swallowed whole Bellesiles’s claims without ever checking his sources. Why bother? The author was a professor at a prestigious university, and besides, the thesis was perfectly suited to the gun-control agenda. Bellesiles’s contention supposedly refuted the arguments of Second Amendment scholars who maintain that the language of the amendment recognizes an individual right to keep and bear arms. Opponents of that understanding insisted that the Second Amendment was only intended to secure a collective right, namely, the right of governments to arm militias and other official forces. The opponents welcomed Bellesiles’s revisionist history as support for that view.

There was a gigantic flaw in Arming America, however. The evidence was largely bogus. Dozens of skeptics scrutinized the book’s documentation, and one scholar after another, including Clayton Cramer, found glaring misquotations and fabrications in the footnotes. When challenged, Bellesiles at first tried to brush off his critics and later took to attacking their supposed motives. His evasions were unavailing. In time it became clear to all but his most die-hard ideological allies that Bellesiles had written a fraudulent and dishonest book. Columbia revoked his Bancroft Prize, and Oxford University Press announced that it would no longer sell the book.

Despite the mountain of evidence against Arming America, there are still people who contend that there were only a few minor problems with it and that its thesis still stands. That’s why Cramer wrote his book: to prove beyond question that Bellesiles was wrong and that firearms were in fact widely owned and used in early America. In that effort, Cramer is overwhelmingly successful, and along the way we learn a good deal about guns in our early history.

In the colonies, Cramer demonstrates, it was common for members of the militia (which included nearly all white men) to supply their own guns and ammunition. Furthermore, in the conflicts with the French and Indians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the soldiers in the militia demonstrated great proficiency with firearms. The widespread ownership and skill in the use of guns during that period are utterly inconsistent with Bellesiles’s assertion that firearms were rare.

Another interesting piece of evidence Cramer adduces is the fact that Indians owned guns. If the settlers really had few guns, how did the Indians come to have substantial numbers of them? Here we encounter one of those enlightening pieces of history. Laws against selling firearms to the Indians were in effect in the colonies, but just like modern gun-control laws, they were unenforceable. Moreover, it appears that the colonists actually benefited from Indian ownership of guns. The Indians could more easily procure game that they would then trade to the settlers. Guns in the hands of the supposed enemy turned out not to be a disaster but rather a mutual benefit.

The colonists’ ability to fight successfully against the veteran professional British army during the Revolutionary War is again strong evidence that the people weren’t strangers to firearms. During the famous British retreat after their sortie to Lexington and Concord, patriot marksmen inflicted heavy casualties on the redcoats. If the people had so few guns, how was that possible? As Cramer writes, “If every American militiaman was not a crack shot, he was certainly a good enough shot with his fowling-piece, musket, or rifle, to terrorize the finest army in Europe at the time.”

Cramer never ventures directly into the debate over the meaning of the Second Amendment, but he doesn’t need to. Armed America thoroughly refutes the notion that guns were rare and therefore the drafters of the Constitution must have meant to protect only a collective, state-centered right. Hats off to Clayton Cramer for his dogged pursuit of the truth.

George Leef is book review editor of The Freeman.

The European Economy Since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond

by Barry Eichengreen

Princeton University Press • 2006 • 504 pages • $35.00

Reviewed by Waldemar Ingdahl

Some topics might prove too daunting to write about even in tomes. Barry Eichengreen, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, has undertaken a difficult task in this book—an economic history of the whole of Europe, a comparison with the United States, and some considerations for the future. The result is a clear and concise book that shakes up some preconceptions.

Recovering from World War II was not as problematic as many think. Eichengreen contradicts Mancur Olson’s view that Europe had to start from scratch and free itself from its historical institutions. He argues that it was precisely this historical continuity that enabled the recovery; just a few years after the war, Europe’s production capacity was back at prewar levels, even considering Germany’s devastation.

It was not a time of technological breakthroughs, but rather of steady recovery, mobilizing the resources unused during the war and implementing some innovations from the United States. This was possible through the political consensus found in the corporativist collaboration among government, industry, and unions, with banks ready to provide the corporations that had survived the war with investments from small-time savers.

The lessons learned from the 1930s were that unions had to agree to hold back demands for wage increases and that governments needed to eliminate trade barriers. The European Economic Community (EEC) was born because it was clear that Europe had been falling behind the United States even before the war. The balkanized and closed economies were unable to exploit economies of scale and scope, and were slow to develop mass-production methods. The EEC provided a regional market appropriate to make best use of the new technologies. With the financial assistance and the export markets of the United States, this proved to be a successful strategy.

But corporativist policies started to founder in the 1970s. The OPEC oil crisis was part of the problem, but the main issue, Eichengreen writes, was that the postwar generations had forgotten the lessons of the past. Unions demanded ever-higher wages and militant strikes pressured corporate profits and investments. Governments tried to calm the economy by expanding the already-extensive welfare state, thereby worsening the high rate of inflation.

Meanwhile, most of Eastern Europe, which had been agricultural, was pushed by the Soviet Union into rapid industrialization. But that region was poorly endowed with energy and industrial raw materials, and its industrial output poorly tailored to the needs of the downstream users. Without the proper price mechanism of a market economy, managers sought to minimize plan targets while maximizing planned allocation of resources. Those economies stagnated in the 1960s, either trying autarky or reforming to “market socialism.” Both paths proved fruitless. The socialist systems made it through the ’70s because loans by Western banks delayed their ultimate collapse.

While Europe struggled, the United States asserted itself. Eichengreen places great importance on the differences in financial institutions. Europe’s banks were geared toward supporting well-established corporations concentrated on producing “more of the same,” while the reliance of American corporations on venture capital favored what Eichengreen calls the “intensive growth” of startups and innovations.

The ’90s proved to be a mixed success for Europe. Liberalization and structural change proved difficult, and rigid labor markets, excessive public spending, and high taxation are still present. But the European Union (EU) was able to weed out some of the worst policies and succeeded in the difficult integration of Eastern Europe.

The book’s analysis is on target. The structures and institutions of the European economies were suited to fine-tuning and applying existing technologies. They were tailored for a world with little international competition, not for the close integration and intense competition following globalization. The EU was designed for a half a dozen countries with complementary economic structures in order to achieve limited economic goals: expanding heavy industry, liberalizing trade, deregulating product markets. It was not designed to support 27 member states with widely different economic structures, political cultures, and visions of the future.

Eichengreen foresees that continuing economic integration and technological advancement will make Europe adapt to a more dynamic model. While arguing for some important reforms, he fails to draw the key conclusion—that Europe was successful in its incremental growth not because of but despite its alliance of big government, big business, and big labor. Europe would be wise to follow its own path, but it would be unwise to think that the European path should retain its high degree of corporativism and government economic planning rather than moving toward free markets.

Waldemar Ingdahl is the director of Eudoxa, a liberal think tank in Stockholm, Sweden.

To the Editor:

In response to Ted Roberts’s article criticizing the admonishing of children to use bicycle helmets (“Take Your Bike Helmet to the Safety Museum,” February), I’d like to offer a couple of unscientific, anecdotal items from my own experience.

One is from a few decades ago, when I was a student. A friend of mine was a regular bike rider in the northern suburbs of Boston. . . . On one occasion he was riding through Inman Square in Cambridge. A “square” is defined in that part of the world as a place where streets meet at an angle, which is not a right angle. . . . You can go straight or take a slight right turn when going through. My friend went straight. A driver decided to take a right turn at the same time and in the same space. Newtonian physics operated as expected. My friend had a helmet and was quite sure he was saved from serious head injury by it. He was, I should note, a libertarian like me, and would not have advocated that anyone be compelled to wear a helmet. The environment he was riding in was quite a bit different from the nearly deserted park Roberts described. So at least the context of the traffic situation needs to be taken into account.

Around 1990 I was riding on a state road in Hollis, New Hampshire, a suburban . . . area with houses, flea markets, and occasional remnants of farms. As I was headed north, a Dalmatian ran full speed into me and knocked me over. I bumped my head on the ground, but wasn’t more than scratched. I was wearing a helmet, as I normally do. I am sure the injuries would have been significantly worse if I hadn’t been. The idiot dog wasn’t trying to hurt me; like the driver in the earlier incident, it just wanted to get from where it was to where it was going and didn’t realize that two objects can’t simultaneously occupy the same space.

There is nothing statist about taking reasonable precautions against injury. And personally, I rather like the image of wearing a helmet “like a fullback, like an infantryman.”

On a more serious note, I need to respond to Roberts’s misuse of statistics: “Just guess where most injuries occur?” More injuries occur driving cars than jumping over Niagara Falls; that doesn’t mean that jumping over Niagara Falls is safer. More injuries occur while driving because people spend far more time driving than bicycling or falls-jumping. Per mile ridden—which is what counts to the individual, and isn’t libertarianism about individuals?—riding a bicycle on a moderately trafficked road at 10 mph is significantly more dangerous than driving a car on the same road at 40 or on an interstate at 75. A car is full-body armor compared to the protection one has on a bicycle.

But thanks for reminding me that I should get my bicycle out again, as soon as the snow starts melting.

—Gary McGath
By e-mail

To the Editor:

I enjoy Ideas on Liberty tremendously but I take great exception to the article by Ted Roberts, “Take Your Bike Helmet to the Safety Museum.” As a magazine aimed at a younger audience, publishing this drivel is totally irresponsible and demonstrates, at least, that nobody in your editorial department rides a bike beyond your lovely campus.

Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, is on Route 9, which is a route often used by recreational bikers (non-professional bikers) who share the road with automobiles, trucks, buses, and motorcycles and face the same issues (wet and potholed streets, drunks, pranksters, and inattentive soccer moms in their SUVs crammed to the roof with screaming kids) as autos do. The difference is that the bike rider is riding a 20 lb. vehicle with most of his skin exposed except for his lycra shorts and shirt. If a rider is knocked to the ground or falls from his bike at normal riding speeds of up to 25-30 mph he hits his head. I can assure you that when a head meets pavement, an immovable object or an oncoming car, a helmet can mean the difference between a broken collarbone, scrapes, and bruises and death or a vegetative state.

Riding in a city at any speed is dangerous and riding off road in the woods, mountain biking, always involves falls, rocks, trees. Why do you think serious recreational bikers wear helmets, because they don’t like the wind in their hair? Why do they wear protective glasses?

To make bike helmets for kids a libertarian issue is nonsense, and Mr. Roberts must have a lot of time on his hands and Ideas on Liberty must have a lot of empty space for this to get into print.

—John Myers
By e-mail

To the Editor:

If Ted Roberts wishes to take his bike helmet to the safety museum, he is surely welcome to do so. As for myself, having had three bike spills over the years—once from crossing a wet railroad track at a sharp angle, another when a pickup truck pulled out in front of me and, most recently, because a dog cut across in front of the bike—I shall continue to faithfully wear my helmet. In none of these accidents would I likely have suffered a brain concussion, but in two of them I would have had some lacerations on my scalp. I’m not sure of the statistics, but I understand that half of bicycle accident deaths are due to head injuries.

One can pay some outrageous prices for bike helmets, but satisfactory headgear can be purchased for $30 or less. I highly recommend wearing a suitable bike helmet, but whether it should be made legally mandatory is a separate area for discussion.

—Phil Clark
Carthage, Ill.

Ted Roberts replies:

I am pleased to receive Mr. McGath’s comments: happy to see that, like myself, he is a believer in the value of anecdotal/personal experience, since his response to my fulminations was two personal anecdotes. That’s a lot better than “data” from the Bike Helmet Manufacturers or Centers for Disease Control—fine organizations, but alas, concerned with growth, not truth. As I said, personal experience is not scientific, but it’s eminently reliable. Mr. McGath makes the very good point that the biking environment has a lot to do with risk of injury. That’s why my thesis was directed at kids who pedal the byways of the neighborhood. If I pedaled to a Manhattan office via the Long Island Expressway, I’d seriously consider headgear. Mr. McGath also mentions that we drive more than we bike—ergo more automotive head injuries. Mile for mile, he says the bike is deadlier. I’m not so sure. Could be. But regardless of the comparative safety of car and bike, wearing the helmet in the car might help, right? I mean, why be half safe?

But my article was not only about the risk of biker head injuries. It’s about the price of prevention, which Mr. McGath does not address. As he says, you can hurt your head falling off a bike. No doubt about it. It is a finite possibility. Of course, even on neighborhood streets you can meet a wayward Mack truck that sneers at your helmet and mashes you into a hamburger. But the pertinent question is not entirely the possibility of head injury. The question is what you’ll pay to prevent injury to you or your child. And the price is steeper for the child with a mind still unformulated. You do not want to implant the scary-world syndrome.

Beside my dining-room window stands a large Bradford pear tree. But even on windy days we have a serene supper without fear that the pear tree will join us at the dining-room table. There is a real probability—akin to head injury on a bike, I’d guess—that the tree will topple. I could call in an arboreal specialist (tree trimmer) and a stonemason (bricklayer) to build an expensive bulwark between that ten-ton tree and my family. But I’m not inclined to pay the economic and aesthetic costs. It’s all about costs—like everything else in life.

Most of my answer above also applies to Mr. Myers and others. But if I were Mr. Myers and wanted to argue with Ted Roberts about his bike-helmet thesis, I’d find and then clearly state egregious accident statistics regarding the probability of head injury. Then I’d relate that danger to the other perils that beset humanity like drowning, traffic accidents, starvation, terrorism, electrocution, and spills out of lofty windows. Having proved the eminence of cracked skulls due to bike mishaps (if such an eminence exists), I’d attack the cost side of his tradeoff. (No, not only the price of the helmet.) I would try to prove them inconsequential compared to the risk of injury.

Mr. Myers does none of this. You can fall off your bike on Route 9, he says. You can be hurt. Yes, I agree. But that is not the point of my essay. The point is that the mind of a child is as vulnerable to fear as it is to pavement. That point went unnoticed by Mr. Myers and others.

It’s not a libertarian issue? Since when do libertarians honor convention? If we didn’t think adventurously, if we didn’t respect the tradeoffs inherent in managing an intelligent life for us and our kids, we’d all have voted for Al Gore. Did he not promise a governmental safety net for all who were oppressed by life’s uncertainties: the poor, the disadvantaged, the clumsy bike rider? Would Mr. Myers have popped a joyful wheelie when we were Gored with National Bike Helmet legislation! That’s not a libertarian concern?

Charity versus Self-Interest

To the Editor:

I must object to Donald Boudreaux’s article “Self-Interest, Part 1” (February 2003). Its premise is that Michael Milken, whose company went bankrupt, “surely” contributed more to society than Mother Teresa, whose religious order thrives long after her passing. Yet the article ignores this sharp contrast in long-term impact.

The reality, to coin a term from the article, is that charity has many powerful economic advantages over commercialism. For example, there are almost no transaction costs in charity—no paperwork, no middlemen, and not even identification requirements. Charitable transactions do not feed government, while commercial ones do generate taxes, including support for ruthless foreign regimes. Moreover, charity is not limited to an agreement between buyer and seller on a specific product or service, as commercial transactions are. In sum, selflessness epitomizes ideals that free enterprise can only strive to attain.

There are many activities where charity has trounced commercialism in the free market. Blood donations, for example, are more easily solicited by appealing to selflessness than by paying compensation. Medical care in general did better when its backbone was charity rather than Medicaid and Medicare. Education, too, was on a higher level when selflessness was its foundation rather than unions and compensation.

Economic freedom does not result from attacking those who donate their time or money rather than accumulate it. Truth be told, capitalism depends on the freedom to give. Unfettered charity is not the rival of free enterprise, but its foundation.

—Andy Schlafly
Far Hills, N.J.

Donald Boudreaux replies:

I hope that I didn’t overstate my argument that self-interest is essential to the great and prosperous society that we Westerners enjoy. Of course Mr. Schlafly is correct to suggest that charitable impulses, and actual charity, often achieve many goals that would not be achieved otherwise.

My point was not that charity has no value, but, rather, that the value of self-interest is too often overlooked by those who celebrate other-regarding motives.

But while space does not permit me to address all of Mr. Schlafly’s points, I must express my disagreement with his claim that Medicaid and Medicare are the “backbone” of modern medical care. These unfortunate government programs do play a large role in today’s health-care market, but they are not its backbone. The backbone of modern medical care is the profit-seeking efforts by private firms to develop new drugs and medical devices, by physicians to provide effective care, and by private insurance companies to supply health insurance.

Guns and Barn Doors

To the Editor:

I enjoyed James Bovard’s February “It Just Ain’t So” about gun control. However, I take exception to his analogy [in this sentence: “Banning guns in response to high crime rates is like closing the barn door after the horse has escaped.”]. I tend to think banning guns in response to high crime rates is like removing the doors from the barn to protect the other horses. This captures the complete idiocy of gun-control policies. First of all, there won’t be any horses left; second, removing the only means of protection of whatever horses may be left won’t make them any safer; and third, it allows any foreign horses (or other critters) to enter the barn easily.

It just don’t make any sense!

—Gordon Smith
Boulder, Colorado