In this article, Frank van Dun offers a retort to Paul Gottfried’s critique.

Volume 16, Number 3 (2002)

In this article, Joseph R. Stromberg reviews Chris Sciabarra’s Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism.

Volume 16, Number 3 (2002)

In this article, Hunt Tooley reviews A. James Gregor’s The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century.

Mention the term “free-market economics” and many people’s thoughts immediately turn to the Chicago School, the academic home of nine Nobel prize winners in economics, more than any other program in the world.

Yet, how sound are their free-market credentials?

Volume 16, Number 4 (2002)

The Chicago School of Economics is seen far and wide as a free enterprise stronghold. The research programs of many of its members are extolled as supportive of capitalism, even by otherwise knowledgeable commentators. This article will show that such an evaluation cannot be supported, at least in the case of Henry Simons, one of the most eminent practitioners of economics to be associated with the economics department of the University of Chicago.

Volume 16, Number 4 (2002)

Volume 16, Number 4 (2002)

Mention “free-market economics” to a member of the lay public and chances are that if he has heard the term at all, he identifies it completely with the name Milton Friedman. For several years, Professor Friedman has won continuing honors from the press and the profession alike, and a school of Friedmanites and “monetarists” has arisen in seeming challenge to the Keynesian orthodoxy.

This article argues that while there are a few transparent similarities between politics and markets, the fundamental differences between them render the Stigler-Wittman view that politics is “just another market,” and therefore always “efficient,” dubious at best. Markets are not perfect in any neoclassical sense (nor is anything else on earth, for that matter), and neither is democracy. The Stigler-Wittman view is based on a false view of how both markets and governments operate and also suffers from being ahistorical.

Volume 16, Number 4 (2002)

“Coase, get your cattle off my land.” –Walter Block 

In one sentence, Walter Block called into question Ron Coase’s central conclusion in his now-famous theorem, namely, that the original distribution of ownership would not affect the allocation of scarce resources in a free market, if there were no transaction costs.

Volume 16, Number 4 (2002)

Douglass North has written many essays and books over forty or more years in which he has sought to reintegrate economic theory and economic history. His project became more and more ambitious over time, producing interesting insights, questions, and narratives. His early interests and work centered on the economics of location, transportation costs, and interregional economic relations in American history. In mid-career, he seized on transaction costs—modified from time to time by other “variables”—as the main motor of history, economic history, and institutional development.

In this article James Rolph Edwards discusses the United States economic system and social security.

Volume 17, Number 1 (2003)