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Book Review

Restart Your Engine: How to Educate an American

A review of How to Educate an American: The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow’s Schools, edited by Michael J. Petrilli and Chester E. Finn.1 Readers who are interested in the future of public education will want to read How to Educate an American: The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow’s Schools edited by Michael J. Petrilli and Chester .. MORE

Featured Article

Taken to the Cleaners

A few days before his first State of the Union address in January 2018, President Donald Trump put his signature on two unusually large tariffs for products widely used by U.S. citizens—washing machines and photovoltaic cells used in solar panels. The President signed those new fees and restrictions into law with the full authorization and .. MORE

Kling's Corner

DNA Determinism

DNA is the only thing that makes a substantial difference, accounting for 50 per cent of the variance in psychological traits. The rest comes down to chance environmental experiences that do not have long-term effects. —Robert Plomin, Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are1 After decades of studying the heritability of psychological traits, Robert .. MORE

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Law and Economics

Eminent Domain and the Problem of Government

By Jon Murphy

Economic Methods

We Must Stop Saying “Must”

By Scott Sumner

Economic Education

EconLog Price Theory: Fentanyl

By Bryan Cutsinger

#ReadWithMe

Introducing We Have Never Been Woke

By Kevin Corcoran

Liberty

A Nonexistent Quote About Free Trade

By Pierre Lemieux

Economics of Health Care

My Weekly Reading for July 27, 2025

By David Henderson

EconTalk

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econtalk-podcast

Read Like a Champion (with Doug Lemov)

Many students graduate high school today without having read a book cover to cover. Many students struggle to learn to read at all. How did this happen? Listen as educator and author Doug Lemov talks with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts about the failed fads in reading education, the mistaken emphasis on vocabulary as a skill, and the .. MORE

econtalk-extra

Viva la Virtual Entrepreneurs

You probably know someone who seems to lose themselves in virtual worlds. But how “unreal” are these virtual realities? In this episode, EconTalk host Russ Roberts welcomes game designer and Forte co-founder Josh Williams to talk about the development of real property rights and market economies in the virtual world of gaming. Roberts and Williams .. MORE

EconLog

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#ReadWithMe

Introducing We Have Never Been Woke

Time again for another one of my multi-post deep dives into a book I found interesting. This time, the book is We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite by Musa al-Gharbi. As always, my next several posts will be my attempts to reflect al-Gharbi’s views rather than my own, and .. MORE

Economic Growth

Joshua Rauh on Federal Spending, Tax Revenue, Economic Growth, and Deficits

On July 26, Joshua Rauh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, testified at the Reagan Library before the House Ways and Means Committee. I learned a lot from his testimony and want to share it. Here are some highlights. A growing economy is essential for expanding economic opportunity for all Americans. It is deeply .. MORE

LIBERTY CLASSICS SERIES

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continued relevance of our classic titles.

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Book Titles

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“Trade Unionism in the United States: General Character and Types”

By Robert F. Hoxie

From the popular viewpoint, trade unionism is a simple, definite phenomenon upon which it is easy and safe to pass positive and sweeping judgments. Almost everyone, in fact, who is at all interested in economic or social affairs is inclined to assume that he knows just about what unionism is and just what ought to .. MORE

Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents and the Two Speeches on America

By Edmund Burke

The first three volumes of this set of Select Works of Edmund Burke, fully edited by Edward John Payne (1844-1904), were originally published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, from 1874 to 1878. Liberty Fund now publishes them again, with a fourth volume of additional writings by Burke. The original set has been praised by Clara I. .. MORE

Book Reviews and Suggested Readings

The War That Never Ends

By Nathan Goodman

A Book Review of Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror, by Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall.1 It’s been over 20 years since the 9/11 attacks. Ever since those horrible attacks, the United States government has been waging a “war on terror” both at home and abroad. The war on .. MORE

Toward the Final Transition

By Stephen Davies

A Book Review of Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made, by Vaclav Smil.1 Over the last two decades, Vaclav Smil has produced a series of outstanding scholarly works across a range of interconnected topics. The core interest in all cases is energy—its sources and uses—but this is embedded in a wider concern with .. MORE

Conversations

VIDEO

Capitalism, Government, and the Good Society

On April 10, 2013, Liberty Fund and Butler University sponsored a symposium, “Capitalism, Government, and the Good Society.” The evening began with solo presentations by the three participants–Michael Munger of Duke University, Robert Skidelsky of the University of Warwick, and Richard Epstein of New York University. (Travel complications forced the fourth invited participant, James Galbraith .. MORE

VIDEO

A Conversation with James M. Buchanan, Parts I and II

Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan (1919-2013) was recorded in 2001 in an extended video now available to the public. Universally respected as one of the founders of the economics of public choice, he is the author of numerous books and hundreds of articles in the areas of public finance, public choice, constitutional economics, and economic .. MORE

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College Economics Topics

Supplementary materials for popular college textbooks used in courses in the Principles of Economics, Microeconomics, Price Theory, and Macroeconomics are suggested by topic.

Economist Biographies

From the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics

Economic Regulation, Government Policy

Rent Control

New York State legislators defend the War Emergency Tenant Protection Act—also known as rent control—as a way of protecting tenants from war-related housing shortages. The war referred to in the law is not the 2003 war in Iraq, however, or the Vietnam War; it is World War II. That is when rent control started in .. MORE

International Economics, Government Policy

Third World Debt

[Editor’s note: this article was written in 1991.] By the end of 1990 the world’s poor and developing countries owed more than $1.3 trillion to industrialized countries. Among the largest problem debtors were Brazil ($116 billion), Mexico ($97 billion), and Argentina ($61 billion). Of the total developing-country debt, roughly half is owed to private creditors, .. MORE

Economics of Legal Issues, The Economics of Special Markets

Crime

Economists approach the analysis of crime with one simple assumption—that criminals are rational. A mugger is a mugger for the same reason I am an economist—because it is the most attractive alternative available to him. The decision to commit a crime, like any other economic decision, can be analyzed as a choice among alternative combinations .. MORE

Quotes

We have never designed our economic system. We were not intelligent enough for that. We have tumbled into it and it has carried us to unforeseen heights and given rise to ambitions which may yet lead us to destroy it.

-F. A. Hayek

The basic elements of economic theory are, of course, the actions of human beings. The science consists in the efforts to predict the effects on human behavior induced by specific changes in the environment.”

-James M. Buchanan Full Quote >>

Anticapitalism can maintain itself in existence only by sponging on capitalism.

-Ludwig von Mises Full Quote >>