Has John Gray come back? Once a classical liberal admired by Murray Rothbard, Gray many years ago abandoned the defense of the free market. Herbert Spencer, he now claimed, was a precursor of fascism; and Friedrich Hayek, no longer in his view a great thinker, was now just another ideologue. To pin down Gray’s ever-changing views was no easy task. When one did manage to understand him, the result hardly repaid the effort. His latest book, though, is in parts much better. In Black Mass, he has not repented and returned to the classical liberal fold.

1. Human Reason

Reason is man’s particular and characteristic feature. There is no need for praxeology to raise the question whether reason is a suitable tool for the cognition of ultimate and absolute truth. It deals with reason only as far as it enables man to act.

Chronic underconsumption is an idea most often associated with Keynes. But while the infamous English economist published his General Theory in 1936, Hayek’s 1929 article “The ‘Paradox’ of Savings” analyzes a similar theory advanced by two Americans a decade before. While the two authors have nearly vanished from history, the insights contained in Hayek’s nearly forgotten article are more necessary today than ever.

The insufferable Henry Blodget, the disgraced securities analyst who is barred from working in the securities industry (he met up with Eliot Spitzer), is back to his usual chatter. He’s pushing for Mozilla to go public. He even recommends that Mozilla buy the Netscape brand and change the company’s name to Netscape.

In his book, For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of History, Charles Adams makes it quite clear that the taxpayers are the real servants, while the so-called public servants — the political class — are simply the masters setting the slave wage. Of course, the primaries, debates, etc., bring this truism to life, with every candidate — save one — saying and doing whatever it takes to be crowned king. And, to the winner goes the spoils. We pay of course.

Chapter 11 of the Last Knight is devoted to the intellectual origin, development and main themes of Mises’s second major book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. Socialism offers a comprehensive analysis of the intellectual case in favor of socialism as economic and political ideal.

Although most commentators concede that the free market does a decent job providing regular goods and services day in and day out, for some reason they believe that when it comes to unlikely but catastrophic events, government intervention is necessary. An excellent example of this misguided mindset is the recent argument over what to do with the federally administered Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We’ll see that government involvement only makes things worse, and that the free market — if only allowed to do its job — would solve the alleged problem.