Economics In Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly . By John Quiggin. Princeton University Press, 2019. Xii + 390 pages. The Australian economist John Quiggin is dissatisfied with Henry Hazlitt’s great book Economics in One Lesson and in his new book endeavors to set its author straight. He says of Hazlitt, “His One
In response to my brief review of an article and book by him, as well as a review of a book by “Bronze Age Pervert,” Michael Anton has written a long attack on me . I do not propose to comment on all of his remarks but only on a few likely to be of interest to readers. Although Mr. Anton and I differ on a great many matters, I should like to
The dominant view of World War II is that it was the “good war.” Hitler bears exclusive responsibility for the onset of war, because he aimed to conquer Europe, if not the entire world. The United States tried to avoid entering the war but was forced into the fight by the surprise Japanese attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. The authors
The Hell o Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy by Stephen M. Walt Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2018 xii + 384 pages Stephen Walt has put himself in a difficult position. He is a Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the author of studies, most notably The
Powerline reports the results of a survey of ideological bias in philosophy. “T he more right-leaning the participant, the more hostility they reported personally experiencing from colleagues, and, overall, the more left-leaning the participant, the less hostility they reported personally experiencing.” The hostility was no mere matter of dislike
[ Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World . By Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell. Regnery Publishing, 2019. 192 pages.] Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell are well-known free market economists, and they do not look with favor on a disturbing trend among American young people. “In the spring of 2016,” they tell us,
[ The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society . By Binyamin Appelbaum. Little, Brown, 2019. 439 pages.] Binyamin Appelbaum is unhappy. He is the main writer on economics for The New York Times , and he thinks that economics has taken a wrong turn. In the first half of the twentieth century, economics was
W hen Murray Rothbard founded the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1977, he wrote an editorial for the first issue. In it, he said, “The Journal of Libertarian Studies has been founded not simply to provide an outlet for scholarship and research that may be unpopular in a particular discipline. It is the belief that there is a new and growing
People are unequal in abilities and circumstances, and because of this, attempts to make them equal by force will inevitably violate their rights to live in freedom. If people have rights, unequal outcomes will result and trying to impose equality will violate their rights. It is as simple as that. Murray Rothbard in Egalitarianism as a Revolt
Yesterday afternoon, Butler Shaffer , one of the great pioneers of the libertarian movement, passed away, two weeks before his eighty-fifth birthday. In a column written in December 2014, he tells us, “My interest in what is now called ‘libertarian’ thinking was kindled in college in the late 1950s. There was no coherent philosophy by that name in
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.