The recent school shootings have led many people to want to restrict or deny altogether our right to own guns, and in these troubled times, it is all the more essential to bear in mind the reasons for that right. To that end, I’d like in this week’s column to discuss the excellent essay by the philosopher Lester H. Hunt “Guns and Self-Defense,” which has just been published in The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism. (It’s a nice touch to have someone named Hunt defending gun ownership.)

Argentina has provided the prime example of counterproductive policy for most of the past century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was one of the wealthiest countries in the world; now it is one of the poorest. More taxation, regulation, and inflation than most other countries experienced have eaten up a large part of the capital that was generated during the era of Argentine capitalism of yore.

Introduction

Among Federal Reserve officials and many economists, it is fashionable to argue that any losses the Federal Reserve should suffer, no matter how large, will have no operational consequence. Is this true? If so, how does the Fed account for its losses and stay solvent? And who ends up paying for these losses?