Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016–2020 By Thomas Piketty Yale University Press, 2021 352 pages Thomas Piketty has written a useful book. Readers need no longer plough their way through his vast Capital in the Twenty-First Century , not to mention his even vaster Capital and Ideology, to understand his message. This fairly
Critics of egalitarianism, meaning by that equality, or close to it, of income and wealth among the members of a society, often claim that it rests on envy. In response, defenders say that there are respectable reasons to favor equality. (I’m assuming that envy doesn’t count as a respectable reason.) For instance, it can be argued that inequality
Left Is Not Woke by Susan Neiman Polity Press, 2023; 155 pp. There is much to dislike in this book. Susan Neiman, a former philosophy professor who now heads the “Einstein Discussion Group” in Potsdam, is a socialist who has good things to say about Communist East Germany and parrots every anticapitalist cliché in the book. I have blasted some of
In his excellent new book In Defense of Capitalism (Republic Book Publishers, 2023), the historian and political scientist Rainer Zitelmann asks a vital question about inequality. In asking this question, he makes a move characteristic of his work. Demands to reduce inequality of wealth and income are widespread, and often debates about proposals
In his book Let’s Have Socialism Now! (Yale University Press, 2001), the French economist Thomas Piketty places great emphasis on “solidarity,” and his opposition to the free market rests to a large extent on its conflict with that purported value. In this week’s column, I’d like to examine what he says about solidarity, and, as you might expect,
Samuelson Friedman: The Battle over the Free Market By Nicholas Wapshott Norton, 2021 367 pages Nicholas Wapshott is a British journalist and biographer with a strong interest in economic theory. He says that the Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps is his mentor. One theme in twentieth-century economics dominates his work: the clash between economists
In this week’s column, I’d like to continue discussing Graham Priest’s unusual book Capitalism : Its Nature and Its Replacement . Priest uses ideas he gets from Marxism and Buddhism to criticize capitalism. Last week, I said that Priest has interesting things to say about Marxism but I avoided Buddhism. This time I won’t avoid it, because the
Capitalism—Its Nature and Its Replacement: Buddhist and Marxist Insights by Graham Priest Routledge, 2021; 312 pp. The title of this book seems at first sight puzzling: what has Buddhism to do with Marxism? When we learn that the author accepts Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism and also wishes to replace capitalism with a type of socialism, we
Last week I wrote about Ludwig von Mises’s important letter to the New York Times in June 1942 about the Nazi economy. In the letter, Mises says that foreign trade poses a difficult problem for a socialist economy. Unlike the citizens of a country controlled by central planning, those in foreign countries don’t have to accept goods offered to
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity By David Graeber and David Wengrow Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021 Xii + 692 pages The Dawn of Everything , which has already attracted much scholarly attention and is a best seller as well, should be a warning to all academics: do not write about economics or the history of modern Europe if you
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.