It’s that time of year again. The first military appreciation day of the year, otherwise known as Memorial Day, is coming up on Monday, May 27.

Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative
By Jennifer Burns
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023; x + 587 pp.

Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1960), an Austrian political economist who emigrated to the United States in 1932 to become a professor at Harvard University, is known for his theories on business cycles and entrepreneurship.

When Bob Nozick entered grad school at Princeton from Columbia in 1959, he was, politically speaking, a run of the mill social democrat. In the same year, another New Yorker, Bruce Goldberg, entered the same Princeton program in philosophy, from the City College of New York. Bob and Bruce had much in common, except that, at that point, Goldberg was an enthusiastic, proselytizing libertarian.

The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
W.W. Norton, 2023; 356 pp.

The law that establishes California’s minimum wage rate at twenty dollars per hour is purportedly aimed at uplifting the state’s working poor. The role of economics is to evaluate such claims through economic theory and empirical evidence.