June
2023

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2023

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2023

March
2023

June 2023

Article

Socialism Is as Socialism Does

By Adam Martin

Some concepts in political economy operate like a Rorschach test. When someone defines them, you often learn more about them than about the concept. Democracy, fascism, capitalism, liberalism, conservatism, neo-anything, and socialism often mean different things to ...

Article

A Wealth Tax Reality Check

By Richard B. McKenzie

At every opportunity, President Joe Biden has pressed a central tenet of his social agenda: "Extremely wealthy Americans don't pay their fair share of federal income taxes" (emphasis added). By Internal Revenue Service definitions of income, top income earners generally...

Article

Why Bigger Isn’t Necessarily Better: A Swiftian Perspective

By Richard Gunderman

Jonathan Swift Healthcare in the United States is in the midst of a massive wave of consolidation. For example, fifty years ago, virtually all non-academic, non-government U.S. physicians had an ownership interest in their practices. Today, approximately 70% of U.S. ...

Book Review

In Search of Stable Money

By Arnold Kling

Under a gold standard, government bonds are nearly free of inflation risk but not of default risk. Under a fiat standard, the reverse is true. ——White, Lawrence H. Better Money: Gold Fiat or Bitcoin? (pp. 214-215).1 In his new book, Lawrence H. White c...

May 2023

Article

John Locke: Mercantilist?

By Eric Mack

I recently had occasion to read (for the first time) John Locke's "Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest, and Raising the Value of Money." [SC]1 Among other things, this got me thinking about the common claim that Locke was a mercantilist.2...

Article

The Economics of Aging: Living Longer versus Living Better

By Walter Donway

The July 2021 issue of Nature Aging—one of the prestigious Nature periodicals' group—published "The Economic Value of Targeting Aging."1 It begins by asserting that changes in U.S. life expectancy and attention to "healthy aging" raise questions that biomedical scie...

Article

Let Go of the Zero-Sum Fallacy and Enjoy Others’ Good Fortune

By Art Carden

People believe many myths, but I suspect few are as pernicious as the zero-sum fallacy. It sees the world as a story of an unending struggle over a fixed prize such that someone who has something only has it because someone else does not. It's an understandable thing to...

Book Review

Legal Safeguards Against Omnipotent Lawmakers

By Pierre Lemieux

A Book Review of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, by Friedrich A. Hayek. Jeremy Shearmur, editor.1 Friedrich Hayek's trilogy Law, Legislation, and Liberty, published in three separate volumes in 1973, 1976, and 1979, was recently republished in a single boo...

April 2023

Book Review

On the Rise of the “Economic Style of Reasoning”

By Donald J. Boudreaux

A Book Review of Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy, by Elizabeth Popp Berman.1 The thesis of University of Michigan sociologist Elizabeth Popp Berman's 2022 book, Thinking Like an Economist, is straightforward....

Book Review

Touching the Elephant

By Kwok Ping Tsang

Review of China's Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption, by Yuen Yuen Ang.1 The parable of blind men touching an elephant is a good description of how scholars are putting forward theories to explain the growth of China. Wanting to ...

Book Review

Cooperation Requires Large Brains

By Arnold Kling

The foundation stone of uniquely human agency is individuals' ability and propensity to form with others a joint goal, thereby creating an evolutionarily unique, socially constituted feedback control system. ——Michael Tomasello, The Evolution of Agency: B...

Book Review

Can Government Intervention Work?

By Rosolino Candela

A Liberty Classic Book Review of Interventionism: An Economic Analysis, by Ludwig von Mises.1 Can government intervention work? The answer to this question is concisely, yet comprehensively answered in Ludwig von Mises's Interventionism: An Economic Analysis,...

March 2023

Article

Liberty Tours: Why Tourism Matters to Liberty

By Mikayla Novak

What is the relevance of tourism to a classical liberal? For the casual observer, tourism may "merely" be interpreted as an opportunistic, temporal break from everyday routines. As important as this may be for many, tourism is an important subject of research i...

Book Review

Rules for Non-Radicals

By M. Scott King

A Liberty Classic Book Review of The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy, by Geoffrey Brennan and James M. Buchanan.1 Geoffrey Brennan and James Buchanan's The Reason of Rules is remarkable. It is an important book, and the questions that th...

Book Review

The Long, Hard Road to “Longtermism”

By James Broughel

Book Review of What We Owe the Future, by William MacAskill.1 An issue that has long divided scholars is the question of how much weight to give to the interests of future generations, especially when making decisions of significant public importance. On ...

Book Review

Financial Policy

By Arnold Kling

... [this book] originated, strange to say, as a study of the history of the international bond market. I came to realize in the course of my research, however, that the bond between creditor and debtor was only one of many bonds I needed to consider; and that in ma...