The law & economics movement has become one of the most dynamic schools within economics. Its origin is often dated back to the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, but insights about the interconnections of economics and the law can be found in the works of earlier economists.
In this article, Steven Yates reviews Tibor Machan’s The Passion for Liberty and Putting Humans First: Why We Are Nature’s Favorite.
In this article, Laurence M. Vance reviews Clint Bolick’s Voucher Wars: Waging The Legal Battle Over School Choice.
Kant’s account of property rights is embedded within his general ethical system, centered on the Categorical Imperative described in the Groundwork and the second Critique. Also, we must look to the account of teleology put forth in the Critique of Judgment and in his shorter political essays if we are to understand the ultimate ground of Kant’s thinking on property rights.
This article will explore the economics of legal tender laws, arguing that they are not only a necessary prerequisite of paper money, but also benefit fractional-reserve banking. Such laws make paper money and fractional-reserve banking more widespread than they would otherwise be. Thus, legal tender laws must be understood as a major factor in the development of Western economies which today operate on paper-money standards and feature very large fractional-reserve banking sectors that grow at over-proportional rates.
This article contains two parts that correspond to the two main fields of monetary theory. The first part examines the evolution of Mises’s analysis of the value of money, and the second part investigates developments in his banking theory.
For many libertarians, the thesis of self-ownership is the foundation of their political philosophy. Natural rights to life, liberty, and property—the protection of which is, according to the libertarian, government’s sole legitimate function—derive from self-ownership, in particular one’s ownership of his body and its parts, of his capacities and labor, and, by extension, of whatever he can acquire by his non-coercive exercise of them.
The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which closed out the era of wars “of”—or allegedly “about”—religion, established what might be called a rule-bound cartel of sovereign, territorial states, conceived as externally equal to one another and internally hierarchical. At that moment, we see an end to any effective claim by the Papacy and the Holy Roman (German) Emperor to universal jurisdiction. The state system that displaced those competitors thereby created a rule-following international “society” of civilized, Christian European monarchies and states.
In this article, Thomas J. DiLorenzo reviews Mark Thornton and Robert B. Ekelund, Jr’s Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War.
