By Rosolino Candela
What relationship, if any, exists between the right to private property and social justice? The concept of social justice has been, and continues to be, an elusive one, particularly because this concept has been broadened to encompass a wide variety of issues, inclu...
By Adam Martin
A Liberty Classic Book Review of The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics, edited by Edwin Dolan.1 What's so Austrian about "Austrian economics?" The label was originally a pejorative, coined by Gustav Schmoller, a harsh critic of Carl Menger's work. ...
By Jeremy Horpedahl
A Book Review of Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue: Tax Follies and Wisdom through the Ages, by Michael Keen and Joel Slemrod.1 Introduction What do you think would happen if suddenly beards and bachelorhood were taxed? Ridiculous, you say? Not so! In the later 17...
By Arnold Kling
"But for some reason, the Dutch started to reject that traditional view of society in the sixteenth century. They entertained the idea that it was perfectly fine to trade and make profits. That new, liberal way of looking at life resulted in a rising standard of liv...
By Stephen Davies
A Book Review of The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind, by Jan Lucassen.1 As the subtitle suggests, Jan Lucassen's massive work of scholarship is ambitious in scope and scale. The entire sweep of human history and the whole of the planet are its canvas an...
By Pierre Desrochers
One key difference between what are sometimes labeled the eco-pessimist and eco-optimist perspectives is their very different take on the place of humanity within broader ecosystems. Anthropocentrism, or more recently "human supremacy," views humankind as the most i...
By Arnold Kling
A common misconception is that if a person has an incentive to do something, that incentive will influence his behavior... people are incentivized against smoking... Almost every smoker knows the costs and risks of their habit, even if they downplay them. The...
By Max Borders
Most students of political philosophy have had some contact with Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia (ASU)1—specifically Part II. And for good reasons. Part II is essential, not only because it sets out devastating critiques of competing moral-political doct...
By Mikayla Novak
A Book Review of Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be, by Diane Coyle.1 Economics has arguably been under greater scrutiny than ever before. Its ontological premises, methodological postulates, conceptual insights, and analytical te...
By Robert L. Bradley Jr. and Richard Fulmer
In a November 2021 article in The Guardian,1 authors Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes—a research associate and a professor in Harvard's Department of the History of Science—denounced Big Oil for advertisements that the authors claim were misleading or worse. Le...
By Pierre Lemieux
A Book Review of Rules and Order, by Friedrich Hayek. Jeremy Shearmur, ed.1 Fifty years ago next year, F.A. Hayek, soon to be awarded a Nobel Prize in economics, published Rules and Order, the first volume of his trilogy Law, Legislation, and Liberty.2 Tw...
By Arnold Kling
In an ideal alternate reality... only the good people—let's refer to them for simplicity as incorruptibles—would be our leaders, our bosses, our police officers. Meanwhile, the people you wouldn't want to have in charge—let's call them corruptibles—would hav...
By Zachary Gochenour
The story of how I became an economist is its own odyssey: I started college as an English major, intending to hone my creative writing skills, and hopefully to drop out after I wrote the first book of an extremely long, best-selling fantasy epic. The winds of fate ...
By Richard B. McKenzie
(A revised and extended version of a tribute to Gordon Tullock published as Professor Gordon Tullock: A Personal Remembrance, by Richard B. McKenzie. Library of Economics and Liberty, December 1, 2014.) Professor Gordon Tullock would have turned one hundred t...
By Arnold Kling
Individuals feel their way toward those situations in which, through the local combination of ingredients making an Interaction Ritual happen, the Emotional Energy payoff is the highest. —Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains,1 p. 177 Sociologis...
