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 ...
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...
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. ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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 ...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...