Great Wars & Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal

Essential to the maintenance of support for the government (almost any government, any time) is the idea that the nation’s wars have been just and heroic, and that the leaders who presided over them were great men. Ugly truths about those wars and leaders are routinely swept under the rug. Court historians (and yes, democracies [...]

Andrew Higgins: Boat Builder of WWII

Who was Andrew Higgins? Almost forgotten now, he was, according to Dwight Eisenhower, “the man who won [World War II] for us.” As General William T. Sherman observed, “War is hell.” That hell includes oppressive taxes, loss of freedom, and crushing debt, as well as deaths in combat. But once in war, as the United [...]

Book Reviews – June 2006

The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly — reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling

The Capitalist Manifesto by Andrew Bernstein — reviewed by Gary M. Galles

Water for Sale: How Business and the Market Can Resolve the Worlds Water Crisis by Fredrik Segerfeldt — reviewed by George C. Leef

Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity by James Gwartney, Richard L. Stroup, and Dwight R. Lee — reviewed by Tom Lehman

Truman’s Attempt to Seize the Steel Industry

In U.S. history many of the most drastic incursions on private property rights have sprung from the conjunction of a threatened work stoppage, owing to a union-management dispute, and the government’s desire to expedite a war-production program. Such a conjunction underlay the government’s nationalization of the railroads, the telegraph lines, and the Smith & Wesson [...]

A One-Armed Economist, Please

“[W]hile purity is an uncomplicated virtue for olive oil, sea air, and heroines of folk tales, it is not so for systems of collective choice.”—Amartya Sen1 President Harry Truman hated what he termed two-armed economists, those who would advise him first “on the one hand” and then “on the other hand.” Give me a one-armed [...]

Globalism and Sovereignty: A Short History of the Bricker Amendment

Mr. Woods, an Intercollegiate Studies Institute Richard M. Weaver Fellow, is a doctoral candidate in history at Columbia University. Historically, conservatives and libertarians have always maintained a suspicion of supranational governing bodies. Their central fear has been that foreign bodies may serve to compromise self-government and American liberties in favor of egalitarian and universalist political [...]