American intellectual life in the early 20th century has a dirty secret and its name is Eugenics. Alex Tabarrok points out an excellent article by Thomas C. Leonard on Protecting Family and Race: The Progressive Case for Regulating Women’s Work (PDF).
A recent post lauded the UK as a homeland of free enterprise, based on some broad statistics about immigration. The World Bank study alluded to here throws a rather different light on the numbers.
One of the best writers of the old liberal school was Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859), the Whig historian, essayist and statesman. He was an unashamed advocate of economic freedom and a writer who excelled at pointing out the errors of logic and abuses of power he saw at work around him, who, according to Walter Olson, “has a fair claim to being the most influential of the British classical liberals.”
[This is Albert Jay Nock’s (1870–1945) introduction to Spencer’s forgotten 1884 classic, The Man versus the State.]
Various fearsome characters will soon be chanting “trick or treat” at doors all over America. That peculiar threat would seem to be a long way from the dismal science, but actually, Halloween reflects economics’ central precept that people choose by comparing the benefits and costs they expect to bear as a result.Modern jack-o-lanterns are carved out of pumpkins because of economics, for example.
