Cleaning Up After the Elephants

I detect a pattern in the challenges hurled at liberals on nearly every issue. The opponent of liberalism describes a problem, invariably with roots in a government infringement of freedom. In response, he prescribes more government interference with freedom, at which point the liberal interjects that the best and only just solution is the repeal [...]

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

The Jewel of Consistency

The acid test is that a man live by the principles he professes to believe.

Dialectics and Liberty

Ten years ago the first two books of what has become known as my “Dialectics and Liberty” trilogy were published. Those books—Marx, Hayek, and Utopia (SUNY Press) and Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (Penn State Press)—together with the culminating work, Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (Penn State Press), constitute a defense of dialectical method [...]

Detroit’s Flirtation with Economic Suicide

Until recently, I had thought the city of Detroit had done everything in its power to drive people and businesses away. I was wrong. From deep down in its barrel of apparently endless crackpot schemes, the Detroit city council pulled out one more. And what a piece of work it was—proof beyond the most shadowy [...]

The Most Insidious Tax

Dale Haywood is a professor of business at Northwood University and an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, both in Midland, Michigan. People don’t generally spend and invest other people’s money as carefully as they do their own. This single, simple fact goes a long way toward explaining why capitalism works and [...]

Book Review: The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, by Patrick J. Buchanan

The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization by Patrick J. Buchanan St. Martin’s Press • 2002 • 308 pages • $25.95 Reviewed by Daniel T. Griswold Give Pat Buchanan his due: The man can write. In his latest book, The Death of the West, he unleashes [...]

Leviathan: America’s Secret Challenge

How helpful of physicist S. Fred Singer, head of the Washington area-based Science and Environmental Policy Project, to restore the idea of “hormesis.” Hormesis is the principle that things beneficial to life in low doses can be fatal in high doses. Singer mentions such things as alcohol, sunshine, iodine, sodium, iron, copper, cholesterol, and nuclear [...]

The Man Who Didn’t “Grow” In Office

Seven miles north of Escanaba in Michi­gan’s Upper Peninsula sits a little town with a very big name. More than a hun­dred years after the death of the town’s namesake it’s unlikely that many of today’s 5,000 residents of Gladstone could tell you much about him. But in the nineteenth cen­tury and for a long [...]