Comment on Preferred Tax Type: Reply to Tabarrok
Jeffrey M. Herbener
I appreciate the opportunity to respond to the criticisms made by Alexander Tabarrok of my preferred-tax-type article since it provides a forum to clarify and elaborate on what is wrong with this neoclassical “theorem,” as he calls it.
Economic Freedom and Interventionism: An Anthology of Articles and Essays. By Ludwig von Mises. Selected and edited by Bettina Bien Greaves. Irvington-on-Hudson, New York: Foundation for Economic Education, 1990.
Admirers of Ludwig von Mises will welcome this new collection of 46 articles and essays, most from the 1950s and 1960s, many rescued from obscure publication, and some recently translated into English. The titles of the book’s subsections, “Economic Freedom,” “Interventionism,” “Mises as Critic,” and “Economics and Ideas,” remind us that Mises dealt with the big issues.
If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise. By Donald N. McCloskey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
The book If You’re So Smart continues and extends the analysis of positivism in economics presented in The Rhetoric of Economics. Here, once again, Donald McCloskey champions the claims of rhetoric. He applies his approach to several issues of economic history and lambastes economists who don the mantle of science for their forecasts of the future.
Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State. By Jonathan Wolff. Stanford University Press, 1991.
Jonathan Wolff sets himself an ambitious goal in Robert Nozick. His principal aim is to offer a guide to Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Beyond this, he says that “part of [my] task will be to reconstruct Nozick’s arguments and conclusions to make them as coherent as possible. . . . I shall try to clarify Nozick’s reasoning and make good the gaps where necessary and possible, so that we might appreciate the force of the arguments, and subject them to rigorous examination” (p.
The Development of Keynes’s Economics: From Marshall to Millennialism
Joseph T. Salerno
One long-standing interpretation of the General Theory, which has been growing in influence recently, emphasizes that Keynes’s sociopolitical vision was formulated long before and, in fact, inspired the heterodox economic analysis and policy prescriptions that were served up in his most influential work. One of the earliest proponents of this interpretation, Joseph Schumpeter ([1951] 1965, p.
How and How Not to Desocialize
Murray N. Rothbard
Everyone in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is seemingly anxious to desocialize, to institute free markets and privatization. Plans profilerate, and innumerable Western economists are being consulted on how to go about this daunting task. It is generally acknowledged that bureaucrats are obstructing the process, but confusion abounds among free-market proponents themselves.
The Role of Entrepreneurship in Desocialization
Jeffrey M. Herbener
Now that communism has been repudiated across Central and Eastern Europe, the most pressing challenge for economic theory is to outline a process of desocialization for the former communist countries. Socialism’s most obvious economic failure is its inability to produce the goods necessary for its citizens to have even a modest standard of living by Western, capitalist standards.
Aurophobia: or, Free Banking on What Standard?
Murray N. Rothbard
Gold, Greenbacks, and the Constitution. By Richard H. Timberlake. Berryville, Virginia: The George Edward Durrell Foundation, 1991.
In recent years, disillusionment with the record of central banking has led a number of economists to return to the nineteenth-century concept of “free banking”: [t]hat is, free and unregulated banking without a central bank.
The Enterprise of Law. By Bruce L. Benson. San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 1990.
Many advocates of the free market hold an odd view of that institution’s scope. Although economists such as F. A. Hayek and James Buchanan laud the market to the skies and never tire of describing the depredations and stupidities of the state, they reverse themselves at a crucial junction.
Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory. By Paul Edward Gottfried. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990.
Economists have in recent years extended their distinctive methods of analysis to the state. According to the public choice school, government officials, like everyone else, attempt to advance their own interests. The possession of power changes their situation but leaves untouched their motivation. The state does not differ in its nature from other institutions.
