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.
Professor Coady is best known for a book on the epistemology of testimony, Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford University Press, 1992); but he has also established a well-deserved reputation as an authority on the just-war tradition. In Morality and Political Violence, he has produced a major work, characterized by an abundance of good sense
In a review of Guido Huelsmann’s great biography, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism, which his come to my attention but has not yet been published, its author makes an odd claim. He says that Huelsmann displays a “hagiographical” attitude toward Mises. This claim cannot survive a careful reading of the book. Though Huelsmann does not disguise
As Glenn Greenwald makes clear, Bush has applied his claim to be above the law far beyond the issue of wiretaps. Bush has acted on the belief that he may seize anyone, even an American citizen living within the United States, and hold him as he deems fit in a military prison, there to be subject to harsh treatment that does not fall short of
Like him or not, Paul Krugman is an economic theorist of distinction, a winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, and often rumored to be in the running for the Nobel Prize. It is disappointing, then, that Conscience of a Liberal contains virtually no economic theory. Instead, the book consists of crude propaganda for a “soak-the-rich” policy. We
Falling Behind, by Robert H. Frank, belongs to an unfortunate genre: books by well-known economists that endeavor to justify crude soak-the-rich policies, writes David Gordon. Paul Krugman and, from an earlier day, John Kenneth Galbraith are perhaps the best-known authors of such works; but Frank fully equals these eminent figures in his railings
Robert Murphy’s admirable book is much more than a conventional defense of capitalism. Murphy includes standard material, e.g., why price controls, minimum wage legislation, and rent control do not work. Though it was once controversial to point to the inadequacies of these measures, now even mainstream textbooks hasten to condemn them. Murphy
Goldberg has in the past treated libertarians with disdain, but here he offers an analysis of fascism that libertarians will find familiar. Goldberg has been influenced by John T. Flynn’s comparison of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal with Italian fascism; and he cites Friedrich Hayek with respect. He has learned from Murray Rothbard on the
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.