A few days ago, while searching online, I came across a mention that September 26 was Leonard Read’s birthday. I was aware of Read’s work as the founder and long-time leader of the Foundation for Economic Education and a prolific teacher of the love of liberty. I had also read many of his short articles, which are impressive for the clarity with which he presents his wholehearted commitment to liberty and recognizes the consequences of its absence. But I had never sat down to read one of his books in its entirety.

This book blows away the conventional interpretations of the crash of 1929, not only in its contents but that this book exists at all. It was written in 1931. He ascribes the crash to the pile of up debt, which in turn was made possible by the Fed printing machine. This created distortions in the production structure that cried out for correction. So what is the answer? Let the correction happen and learn from our mistakes.

Because you can never have too many mathematicians, engineers, and rocket scientists ... [1] The eSchool News online headline reads, “Report reveals a disconnect between what policy makers believe is important for students--and what parents and kids think they need for themselves.” Shocking? No. Parents working in the private sector understand which skills are important, and they have a better understanding than any government official of their children’s abilities and goals.

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom. There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, “Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don’t watch out.” These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen within the form, when “one thing takes the place of another, so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about revolution in the state.” Worse outwitted were those who kept trying to make sense of the New Deal from the point of view of all that was implicit in the American scheme, charging it therefore with contradiction, fallacy, economic ignorance, and general incompetence to govern.

[This article is taken from chapter 5 of The Betrayal of the American Right.]

[This article is taken from chapter 4 of The Betrayal of the American Right.]

From the beginning of the “marginal” revolution economists have had to take a stand on a very simple problem. They’ve needed to explain how we move from the private and purely logical world of a value relations (marginal utility theory) to the the public and causal world of changing relative price relations. Economists have never done a very good job of this.

The outstanding merit of Brian Doherty’s book is that it contains a treasure trove of valuable information regarding the events, personalities, periodicals and organizations whose complex interplay influenced the intellectual and institutional development of the modern American libertarian movement.