World History

Free-market economists don't run the world, and book reviewers at the NYT should stop pretending they do.

As it celebrates 70 years of the "People's Republic," China shouldn't forget its rise was made possible by its turn away from communism.

State intervention and a crushing fiscal policy made the whole empire groan under the yoke; more than once, both poor men and rich prayed that the barbarians would deliver them from it.

Reason, equality, separation of church and state, and science and politics freed from religious dogma have characterized the Enlightenment. Have these ideas given us freedom, or cost us freedom?

The question is not whether economic progress makes people happy. Most mothers feel happier if their children survive, and most people feel happier without tuberculosis than with it.

Bob Murphy uses examples from Dan Carlin’s amazing podcast, Hardcore History, to illustrate the flaws with state-provided military services.

The Liechtenstein constitution goes to great pains to place obstacles in the way of exercising state power. It also has provisions explicitly allowing for secession.

By advocating an increased monetary role for the state, Keynes has made the credit cycle considerably worse and more destabilising.

If Keynes was such a model champion of the free society, how can we account for his peculiar comments, in 1933, endorsing, though with reservations, the social "experiments" that were going on at the time in Italy, Germany, and Russia?

Price-control schemes have been failing for thousands of years. Now it looks like politicians in Washington are going to give price controls yet another try.