As I mentioned in an earlier article , Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains has aroused controversy, in large part owing to her many inaccuracies and misleading remarks. I’d like in this note to call attention to a few more of these. She begins the book’s Prologue with a summary of an article by Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, “The Public
In an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, May 20-21, 2017 under the pretentious title “ An Einstein for the Dismal Science ,” Eric Maskin made extravagant claims for the significance of Paul Samuelson. For Maskin, himself a Nobel laureate in economics, Samuelson was one of the three “most important creative economists of the 20 th
The economist David Henderson has called attention to an argument used by Milton Friedman to defend freedom. Henderson believes, in my view correctly, that the argument fails; and I would like here to examine it. Friedman’s argument was offered in an interview conducted in 1974 by Reason magazine. Friedman states the argument in this way: I think
If Genevieve Valentine has given us an accurate account , Nancy MacLean has written an incredibly bad book on libertarianism. The book is called Democracy in Chains , and according to Valentine, MacLean traces modern libertarianism to none other than James Buchanan, the founder of the Virginia school of economics. Buchanan, we learn, led a 60
[ Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable. By Jeffrey D. Sachs. Columbia University Press, 2017. Xx + 130 pages.] Jeffrey Sachs is no friend of the free market, and I am not known for favorable reviews. It was not to be expected, then, that I would like his new manifesto; and indeed I do not. But one excellent chapter
The Curse of Cash Kenneth S. Rogoff Princeton University Press, 2016 Kenneth Rogoff would sharply disagree with Peale, a character in the 1915 novel It Pays to Advertise , who said that the most beautiful word in the English language is “cash.” For Rogoff, a distinguished monetary economist (and chess grandmaster) who teaches at Harvard, cash,
Many people in Catalonia wish to secede from Spain and form their own country, but the Spanish government has used force to block them from doing so. What should libertarians think of this conflict? In trying to answer this question, it is useful to seek guidance from Mises and Rothbard. Not that these two thinkers are always right, but it is a
Today would have been the 81st birthday of Ralph Raico, who died last December 31. His intellectual brilliance was evident from an early age, and while still in high school, he attended Ludwig von Mises’s seminar at New York University. There he met Murray Rothbard, who became his lifelong friend. Ralph was one of the most brilliant members of
A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order by Richard Haass Penguin Press, 2017 Richard Haass is a foreign policy professional of great knowledge and experience. He has served as director of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department; and for the past 14 years, he has been president of the Council on
The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Economic Growth, and Increase Inequality . By Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles. Oxford University Press, 2017. Viii + 221 pages. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Progressives claimed that the American political system was corrupt. Large financial and
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.