A Hit Man Confesses

John Perkins’s book on corruption in economic development has been a smash hit. It contains much that is true, writes Christopher Westley. But it also spreads a dangerous fallacy that equates government aid with foreign investment generally. In developing countries, a new Nike plant is a godsend. It is perverse to assume that a Wal-Mart in China or a McDonald’s in South Korea is analogous to a Bechtel in India or a Halliburton in Iraq.

Milton Friedman, 1912-2006

Few American economists have wielded as much influence on economic thought and policy as the late Milton Friedman, writes Hans Sennholz. He was an articulate and ardent advocate of free markets and personal liberty. Yet Sennholz has been at odds with Professor Friedman ever since he advanced his monetarist thought. It is strange that Professor Friedman and his fellow monetarists, who are such defenders of the market order, should call on politicians and bureaucrats to provide the most important economic good — money.

Nation and Nationality

The Nation as Speech Community

The concepts nation and nationality are relatively new in the sense in which we understand them. Of course, the word nation is very old; it derives from Latin and spread early into all modern languages. But another meaning was associated with it.

Life, Liberty, and ...

For almost a full century before the Revolution of 1776, writes Albert Jay Nock, the classic enumeration of human rights was “life, liberty, and property.” The American Whigs took over this formula from the English Whigs, who had constructed it out of the theories of their seventeenth-century political thinkers, notably John Locke. It appears in the Declaration of Rights, which was written by John Dickinson and set forth by the Stamp Act Congress. In drafting the Constitution of Massachusetts in 1779 Samuel and John Adams used the same formula. But when the Declaration of Independence was drafted Mt Jefferson wrote “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and although his colleagues on the committee, Franklin, Livingston, Sherman, and Adams, were pretty well tinctured with Whig philosophy, they let the alteration stand. It was a revolutionary change.

Get a Raise, Wreck the Economy

From the daily email from the Wall Street Journal:

Last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in a speech that he remained worried about inflation, that risks to prices were tilted mainly toward the upside, and tight labor markets especially have the potential to drive prices higher even as the economy gets roughed up by the deteriorating home market and a tough patch for the auto industry. It was thus a relief to the markets to hear that labor inflation is being stuffed back into a cage, and stock futures bounded higher this morning on the news.
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