How Nineteenth-Century Americans Responded to Government Corruption

James Rolph Edwards is an associate professor of economics at Montana State University-Northern. From its origin as a distinct secular scientific discipline with the French Physiocratic school in the middle of the eighteenth century, and the British classical school that followed, economics had a pro-market, limited-government orientation. Indeed, intellectual historians and political philosophers often refer [...]

Japan and the Macroeconomic Debate

“Economics is a very dangerous science” -JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES1 “Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man.” -HENRY HAZLITT2 There is no better example of today’s heated debate over macroeconomics than Japan. What policy should this nation–economically the second largest in the world–adopt to start growing again after a decade [...]

Pulling Down the Keynesian Cross

In his third and final volume on John Maynard Keynes, Robert Skidelsky comes to the shocking conclusion that the Keynesian revolution was temporary, that Keynes’s General Theory was really only a “special” case, and that “free market liberalism” has ultimately triumphed. This is all the more amazing given that Lord Skidelsky has spent the past 20 years of his professional career studying Keynes and resides in Keynes’s old estate, Tilton House. Few scholars would have the guts to repudiate the theory of the man they adore.

Two Lucky People

I still remember, after more than 30 years, my mounting excitement as I read Capitalism and Freedom for the first time and discovered the wondrous moral and economic benefits of being “free to choose.” Reading it changed my professional life. Here was solid economic reasoning, but economics with a heart, and—unbelievably—economics that was exciting. All [...]

America Is Number 1 Again

In 1991, I prepared an advertising campaign for my book Economics on Trial (Irwin). The headline was: “Japan and Germany Win World War III,” followed by the subtitle, “Their formula multiplies wealth so rapidly that they will achieve their goal of world domination by the year 2000.”

Recently I came across a delightful book that confirms my view that America is once again on top of the world: the fourth edition of The Illustrated Book of World Rankings, edited and compiled by George Thomas Kurian.[2] Out of some 100 positive listings, the United States received top billing in 33 categories. Among them:

Withholding the Taxpayer Hostage

How often have you heard people say with pleasure, “I got a tax refund this year!”? Americans have grown so immune to income-tax withholding that many people regard IRS refunds as gifts. Misperceptions about withholding are widespread. In fact, withholding is a regressive, costly, and furtive system for collecting taxes. Fifty-six years ago Congress approved [...]

Do Corporations Have Social Responsibilities?

John Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation, a public-policy think tank in North Carolina, and the author of The Heroic Enterprise: Business and the Common Good (Free Press, 1996). Businesses are accustomed to being criticized for neglecting their responsibilities to society. Complaints that private enterprise puts profit before people have long provided reliable [...]

Today’s Most Influential Economist?

Fill in the blank. Who is the mysterious economist named above? Most of my colleagues named Milton Friedman, but in Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw’s bestseller, the Chicago economist runs a close second to. . . .

F.A. Hayek, the Austrian economist!

Why Hayek? Because,

Vienna and Chicago: A Tale of Two Schools

Since its inception, the Foundation for Economic Education has been associated with two free-market schools, the Austrian school of Ludwig von Mises and, to a lesser extent, the Chicago school of Milton Friedman. Mises, after leaving Vienna for New York City, was closely involved with Leonard Read, FEE’s founder. He spoke frequently at FEE’s headquarters in Irvington-on-Hudson, and wrote regularly for The Freeman.