When Elizabeth Warren performs verbal, accounting, and economic distortions to claim that her cornucopia of government expansion plans will be paid for almost without any cost to anyone not tagged with the scarlet letter R (for Rich), she is following in President Obama’s footsteps. During his campaign, he derided John McCain’s tax and spending proposals for not adding up and claimed ethical superiority because his own plans were “fully paid for.” Of course, he then ramrodded through the largest unfunded government expansion in history.

[Chapter 13 of The Conquest of Poverty.]

For more than a century the economic thinking not only of the public but of the majority of economists has been dominated by a myth — the myth that labor unions have been on the whole a highly beneficent institution, and have raised the level of real wages far above what it would have been without union pressure. Many even talk as if the unions had been chiefly responsible for whatever gains labor has made.

Is socialism the enemy of the civilized order? It depends on what kind of socialism we are discussing. There are several varieties, not only one. If it is the version calling for government ownership and control of all the means of production, the complete nationalization of all industries, then yes, socialism is the work of the devil. All we need do to demonstrate this is mention economic basket cases like Venezuela, East Germany, Maoist China and the USSR. They produced dire poverty and the deaths of millions of innocent people.

In my days before I worked for the Mises Institute, I had a colleague who knew I associated with Austrian school economists. In the wake of the bailouts and quantitative easing that followed the 2008 financial crisis, he’d sometimes crack, “Where’s all that inflation you Austrians keep talking about?”

But then, in the very same conversation, he’d remark with dismay on how much housing-price increases had outpaced household income in the region.

In 1959, Henry Hazlitt’s book, The Failure of the “New Economics,” was published by D. Van Nostrand Company, a reputable but midsized publishing company. The book was subtitled An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies.

In a recent lecture I gave at the Institute for Humane Studies, I examine claims that Smith would today be on the political left. I quote from Amartya Sen, Emma Rothschild, Samuel Fleischacker and others. Touched upon are issues of Smith on progressive taxation, poverty relief, work regulation, schooling, usury, and the third duty of the sovereign:

“The left Smithians have some good points ... but generally speaking, they’re overplaying their hand.”