May
2024

April
2024

March
2024

February
2024

May 2024

Article

Is China Winning? Rethinking Perceptions of Success in Central Planning

By Ryan Yonk and Ethan Yang

The contrast often presented between America and China is one where Beijing is a highly competent, well-oiled autocracy while the United States is a political circus held back by partisan drama. On the surface, and especially with recent news headlines, this may seem tr...

Article

California Dreaming: The Effects of California’s “Fast Food” Minimum Wage

By Richard B. McKenzie

On April 1 of this year, California fast-food restaurant chains with sixty or more national locations (for example, McDonalds and Chipotle, but not Bill's Burgers or Dick Church's Diner or other off-brand restaurants in the state without national locations) were require...

Book Review

Using Reason to Understand the Abuse and Decline of Reason

By Rosolino Candela

A Liberty Classics Book Review of Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason: Text and Documents, by F.A. Hayek (edited by Bruce Caldwell). 1 According to F.A. Hayek, what are the theoretical and historical reasons for the tragedies of socialism that emerged ...

Book Review

Mir McLuhanism

By Arnold Kling

... digital media not only enhance information exchange and render offline life obsolete—they also reverse literacy and retrieve orality. ... This book is about orality, which once was obsolesced by writing, and about literacy, which is now becoming obsoles...

April 2024

Article

China’s Belt and Road Initiative: If You Build It, Will They Come?

By Gregory Caskey

To begin with a bit of trivia, who said the following line? "When you give roses to others, their fragrance lingers on your hand." If you guessed Cole Porter, you'd be wrong. Nor does this line hail from a wooden quote board for sale on Etsy. It was delivered by ...

Book Review

Individualism versus Racism

By Arnold Kling

Similarly, to advocate colorblindness is not to pretend you don't notice race. To advocate colorblindness is to endorse an ethical principle: The colorblind principle: we should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives...

Article

Misanthropy Springs from the Lust for Power: H.G. Wells

By Richard Gunderman

H.G. Wells Best known today for science fiction novels such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells was in his own day widely regarded as a prophet. Trained in science, he predicted the wireless telephone, directed energy weapons...

Book Review

Princess Mathilde and the Immorality of Politics

By Pierre Lemieux

A Liberty Classics Book Review of Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, and Order, by Anthony de Jasay.1 We cannot be against politics, especially in a democratic regime; isn't that obvious? In his 1997 book Against Politics: On Government, Anarchy, a...

March 2024

Article

Orthodox Jewish Healthcare During the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Rachael Behr LaRose

The assumption commonly prevails that effective healthcare provision, especially during public health disasters like pandemics, must come from top-down authorities. Yet, this assumption overlooks the reality that local communities actively and routinely orchestrate the ...

Article

Why Protect a Rich South Korea from a Nuclear North Korea?

By Doug Bandow

As if Washington was not busy enough internationally, serious Korea analysts wonder if Northeast Asia could erupt in flames. North Korea is rewriting its constitution to drop plans for peaceful reunification with the Republic of Korea, declaring the South to be the Nort...

Book Review

Milton Friedman’s Many Battles

By Arnold Kling

Characteristically, Friedman had a contrarian take on the Washington consensus. Ironically, the turn toward markets gave new life to the classic institutions of the postwar managed economy, namely the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). No longer w...

Book Review

America’s Animal Spirits

By Samuel Gregg

A Book Review of Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street, by Jackson Lears.1 When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the young American republic in the early 1830s, he immediately noticed a deep restlessness which char...

February 2024

Article

Public Health from the People

By Byron Carson

There are many ways to privately improve public health. Such responses make use of local knowledge, entrepreneurship, and civil society and pursue standard goals of public health like controlling the spread of infectious diseases. Moreover, private responses improve ove...

Article

Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Adam Smith’s Impartial Spectator

By Michael L. Davis

Book Review of Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, by Michael Lewis1 and Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson.2 Economists don't find people all that interesting. Many of us have friends and family, but our models and analysis are devoid of personality ...

Book Review

Setting the Record Straight on Income Inequality

By Art Carden

Book Review of The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early.1 Everyone knows inequality is growing. As a trio of economists consisting of former senator Phil Gramm, economics professor Robe...

Book Review

The Pre-Modern Order

By Arnold Kling

Pre-industrial society was characterized by low degrees of economic, political and cultural integration. By contrast, a high degree of integration in all three respects is the hallmark of modernity... Economically, modernity breeds integration by its systemat...