As I read The Executive Unbound , I found myself in a world turned upside down. I take the following to be not only true, but obviously true: Today and in the recent past, all-but-uncheckable presidents have involved us in unneeded wars, invaded our liberties, and subjected us to economic controls that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to fascism.
Most often the state compels you to do things, not because these things are supposed to be good for you, but because they fulfill the state’s purposes. The state doesn’t take your money to help you. Sometimes, though, the state does pass laws that claim to restrict people for their own good, e.g., laws that forbid use of certain drugs that are
The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy by Mervyn W. King W.W. Norton & Co. 2016 xv + 431 pages Mervyn King is the British Ben Bernanke. An eminent academic economist, who now teaches both at New York University and the London School of Economics, King was from 2003 to 2013 Governor of the Bank of England. In
Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economic Relations at the Council on Foreign Relations. One can be sure, then, that his new comprehensive book, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan , reflects an Establishment point of view. As if this were not enough to tell us where the book is coming
[ The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, and the Freemasons to Facebook by Niall Ferguson, Penguin Press, 2018.] Niall Ferguson has impeccable credentials as a member of the “Establishment” (a word that comes, he tells us, from the historian A.J.P. Taylor). He has taught history at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and NYU and is also a
Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl Princeton University Press, 2018 xii + 337 pages Radical Markets has at least one virtue. The book contains many unusual proposals, and I propose to concentrate on one of the strangest of these. Eric Posner, a legal scholar, and Glen Weyl, a
As Joseph Stiglitz sees matters, the euro suffers from a fatal flaw. The euro is the currency of 19 European countries; and common money blocks efforts of nations that, according to Stiglitz, need to devalue their currencies. More generally, attempts to restrict government control of the economy arouse the wrath of this implacable enemy of the
Few books have as misleading a title as Hard Choices . For Hillary Clinton, as this tedious memoir of her years as Secretary of State makes evident, there are no hard choices. The Solutions to all political and economic problems are easy. We must always rely on the directing hand of government, guided by the superior wisdom of our moral and
In the view of John Tamny — an editor at Forbes and RealClearMarkets — economics as it is usually studied and taught in universities is unnecessarily complicated. The basic truths of economics are simple and require no difficult mathematics to understand. Readers will be reminded of Hazlitt’s great Economics in One Lesson . Entrepreneurs vs.
Concrete Economics: The Hamilton Approach to Economic Growth and Policy Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong Harvard Business Press Review, 2016 xi + 223 pages Cohen and DeLong are well-known economists, but they indict their fellow economists for an overemphasis on theory. Away with models that have little relation to reality, our authors say.
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.