This is not a bad book, but almost every major thesis in it is wrong or unproved. According to our author, human society depends to a large extent on "social capital."
In the course of a largely appreciative review of Murray Rothbard's An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, David Prychitko, who has long positioned himself as an anti-Rothbardian, makes a few mistakes worthy of attention.
Thank goodness this bloody century, the era of communism, national socialism, fascism, and central planning-in short, the century of government worship-is coming to an end. May we use the occasion to re-pledge our allegiance to human freedom, which is the basis of prosperity and civilization itself, and to repudiate every ideological force that opposes it.
The free economy has liberated the human spirit to produce a level of prosperity unknown in the history of the world. (Opinion column by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.)
The most conspicious and odious symbol of socialist tyranny came down ten years ago. (Reflections by Tibor R. Machan)
This year marks the 250th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest of all German writers and poets and one of the giants of world literature. In his political outlook, he was also a thorough-going classical liberal, arguing that free trade and free cultural exchange are the keys to authentic national and international integration. He argued and fought against the expansion, centralization, and unification of government on grounds that these trends can only hinder prosperity and true cultural development
The old formula is at work: distract the people from internal corruption. (Article by Yuri N. Maltsev)
The sordid history of failed economic predictions in our time. (Analysis by Clifford F. Thies.)
Mises on anti-profit language and literature. (Column by William Peterson)
The Titanic story began to be politicized as soon as news arrived that the ship had gone down in the North Atlantic during the early hours of April 15, 1912. Senator William Alden Smith, a "progressive" Republican and friend of activist government, called the White House to find out what President Taft intended to do about the disaster. He discovered that Taft did not hold the typical twentieth-century assumption that the president of the United States is responsible for solving every problem in the world. Smith was told that Taft intended to do nothing about the Titanic.
