Feb 4 2019
How can someone publish a book asking if capitalism can survive, offer no hope that it can, and still become widely applauded as a strong advocate of capitalism? The most obvious way is to be a world-class economist named Joseph Alois Schumpeter. The next notable way is to be Benjamin Rogge (1920-1980), not a world-cla...
One of the signs of advancing age in the American college professor is a tendency for him to write less and publish more. This seeming paradox is easily explained by the phenomenon of Collected Works, that is, by what on television would be described as reruns. As in television, no great public outcry is needed to bri...
I must have been forty years old before reading Frederic Bastiat's classic The Law. An anonymous person, to whom I shall eternally be in debt, mailed me an unsolicited copy. After reading the book I was convinced that a liberal-arts education without an encounter with Bastiat is incomplete. Reading Bastiat made me kee...
Eugene Richter (1838-1906) was a member of a generation of classical liberals who died between the turn of the 19th century and the First World War. This generation included the French economist Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912), the English sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), the English historian Lord Acton (183...
The Man Versus The State by Herbert Spencer was originally published in 1884 by Williams and Norgate, London and Edinburgh. The book consisted of four articles which had been published in Contemporary Review for February, April, May, June, and July of 1884. For collection in book form, Spencer added a Preface and a Po...
I am a lead pencil--the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.... [From "I, Pencil"]
In preparing this volume, I have attempted to write a descriptive essay on the past and present monetary systems of the world, the materials employed to make money, the regulations under which the coins are struck and issued, the natural laws which govern their circulation, the several modes in which they may be replac...
