By Richard Gunderman
Free market economics and libertarianism are often linked, rightly or wrongly, with egoism, selfishness, and greed. In Leviathan (1651), perhaps the first great modern political text, Thomas Hobbes writes that "No man gives but with the intention of good to himself,...
By Pierre Lemieux
A Liberty Classic Book Review of The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock.1 First published sixty years ago this year, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock's The Calculus of Consent: Lo...
By Arnold Kling
In this book I have supplemented "liberal science" with the term "reality-based community," by which I mean the social network which adheres to liberal science's rules and norms.... The community's interactions are structured and elaborate and amount to much more ...
By Nathan Goodman
A Book Review of Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror, by Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall.1 It's been over 20 years since the 9/11 attacks. Ever since those horrible attacks, the United States government has b...
By Rosolino Candela
Professor Israel M. Kirzner, more than any other economist of the Austrian School (and among economists in general) since the second half of the 20th century, has revived our understanding of the systematic role of the entrepreneur as the driving force of the market as ...
By Arnold Kling
With the rise of Third Wave Antiracism we are witnessing the birth of a new religion, just as Romans witnessed the birth of Christianity. The way to get past seeing the Elect as merely "crazy" is to understand that they are a religion. To see them this way is not ...
By Michael L. Davis
An Essay and Book Review of The Essential UCLA School of Economics, by David R. Henderson and Steven Globerman.1 When you think about dinosaurs—which you should; dinosaurs are awesome—you always end up with the same two questions: where did they come from and...
By Stephen Davies
A Book Review of Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made, by Vaclav Smil.1 Over the last two decades, Vaclav Smil has produced a series of outstanding scholarly works across a range of interconnected topics. The core interest in all cases is energy—its...
By Nicolás Cachanosky
The cryptocurrency world has continuously grown since the launch of Bitcoin in January 2009. The novel cryptocurrency was initially launched as a payment technology, namely, to make peer-to-peer transactions without the need for a financial intermediary between the ...
By Arnold Kling
The central problem in monetary policy is that the variables that a central bank can easily control on a day-to-day basis, such as the fed-funds rate, the monetary base, and the price of gold, do not reliably correlate with the things we care about, such as the CP...
By Walter Block
A Liberty Classic Book Review of Ludwig von Mises. 2011[1940]. Interventionism: An Economic Analysis. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.1 There is no small book that can take the place of Ludwig von Mises' magisterial book, Human Action.2 However, if there were ...
By Arnold Kling
The best, most all-encompassing way to describe our world is hyper-novel. As we will show throughout this book, humans are extraordinarily well adapted to, and equipped for, change. But the rate of change itself is so rapid now that our brains, bodies, and social ...
By Roger Donway
When a business exploits political interventionism for profit, several terms may be used to describe the undertaking. If one is looking at the exploitation from the perspective of political science—and perceives the behavior as a special-interest group corrupting impa...
By Caroline Breashears
Review of We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Modern Library Classics. July 11, 2006. First written 1921.1 Decades before Gene Roddenberry launched the U.S.S. Enterprise, Yevgeny Zamyatin imagined the maiden voyage of INTEGRAL, a spaceship designed to carry the odes...
By Arnold Kling
... people see minds in terms of two fundamentally different factors, sets of mental abilities we label experience and agency. The experience factor captures the ability to have an inner life, to have feelings and experiences. It includes the capacities for...
