When a politician talks of "reform," grab your wallet. As in "welfare reform," for example. For as any hardened inside-the-Beltway observer of dark Washington ways can tell you, "welfare reform" is typically a spin for tightening the screws on the taxpayer and easing welfare access.
The main political divide of our time is between those who trust the state and those who do not. We can argue without end about economics, regulation, trade, and war, but we have not touched the core issue until we address the questions: what is the state, and how much, if any, faith should we put in it? Alberto Mingardi is our guide through the literature.
With the average American spending more to fund government than to buy food, clothing, and shelter combined, the greatest impact the government has on those of us for whom it "cares so much" is through the huge gap it creates between the value of our productive contribution to others in the workplace and what we actually take home.
In economics literature, the rhetoric about "market failure" too often serves as a mask for boundless faith in the power of the state. D.W. MacKenzie examines the case of Joseph Stiglitz, who is always hopeful that government will change under his guidance.
Abraham Lincoln is incorrectly remembered as a restorer of liberty, while Prussian autocrat Otto von Bismarck is generally seen as a ruthless dictator, eager to sacrifice men to his policy of deciding the future of his countrymen "by blood and iron." Contrary to this view, Adam Young explains why both men should be viewed as allied together in the common cause of destroying the principles of classical liberalism.
This is the last formal lecture by Ludwig von Mises delivered May 2, 1970 at an economic seminar in Seattle, Washington.
Brazil, which is so blessed by nature and by an entrepreneurial population with one of the highest rates of self-employment in the world, has been kept down by a misleading ideology. Antony Mueller explains the political effects of embracing Auguste Comte, an embrace which no financial bailout can fix.
D.W. MacKenzie contrasts economic methodologies to show how Austrian economists employ sound theoretical concepts that guard against the wiles of political and ideological fashion. Data alone will not keep us grounded, while indulging in socialist fantasies end only in our sinking to the worst depths of poverty and despotism.
As soon as Abraham Lincoln and the new Republican Party gained power, the average tariff rate was quickly raised from a nominal 15 percent to 47 percent and higher, and remained at such levels for decades after the war. South Carolinian John C. Calhoun's free-trade arguments, as eloquent and advanced as they were, were no match for a federal military arsenal.
