Book Reviews – January 2008

• The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care
  
  by David Gratzer Reviewed by Jane M. Orient
  
• Self-Determination: The Other Path for Native Americans
  Edited by Terry L. Anderson, Bruce L. Benson, and Thomas F. Flanagan Reviewed by William L. Anderson, Jr.
  
• The Wal-Mart Revolution
  by Richard Vedder and Wendell Cox Reviewed by George Leef
• On the Wealth of Nations
  by P.J. O’Rourke Reviewed by Raymond J. Keating
  

It’s Always Something

Our economy is in the middle of an extraordinary run of success. Unemployment is low.Personal wealth is near an all-time high. Real wage growth sometimes appears less robust, but when benefits are included, real compensation is healthy. And even with the cries from some that economic mobility
isnt what it once was, legal and illegal immigrants continue
to flock to the United States. Evidently being poor here beats being poor elsewhere by a long shot.

Hurricane Katrina: Government versus the Private Sector

If the “American government would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn’t be in this crisis.” Louisiana’s Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard, paraphrasing Sheriff Harry Lee during an interview on “Meet the Press,” got to the root of all that went wrong in the buildup to and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last August. “It’s [...]

Who Hates Wal-Mart and Why?

America remains a country where you can get fabulously rich rolling the dice on a business venture or lose all your money. We have the greatest venture-capital market in the world. Our culture honors success almost unashamedly, from athletes to entertainers to entrepreneurs. At the same time, there is a tendency to tear down the [...]

Free-Market Miracle: From Sri Lanka to Wal-Mart

Ralph Hood is a writer in Huntsville, Alabama. Having spent much of my adulthood in the aviation industry, I belong to the Greater Northern Alabama Lying Pilots’ Coffee Drinking and Tale Telling Society. We meet erratically and unreliably, solely for our own entertainment. One member, Don Langford, flies freight all over the world in huge [...]

Stopping Government Sprawl

Timothy Terrell is an assistant professor of economics at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C. In a scene that is repeated countless times each year in cities all over the world, a local government is preventing a landowner from building a legitimate business on his property. Tom Winkopp, owner of a 50-acre site in Clemson, South [...]

Economics, Law, and Personal Relationships

David Laband is a professor of economics at Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama. John Sophocleus is an instructor in Auburn’s economics department. Two recent, headline-making judicial decisions in civil cases offer striking reminders about why judges, juries, and legislators would benefit from instruction in basic economic principles. The decisions rendered in these cases involving personal relationship [...]