Journal of Libertarian Studies 19, no. 3 (Summer 2005)
MALINVESTMENT” ENOUGH TO GO BUST? By Enrico Colombatto. The business cycle refers to fairly broad changes in economic activity according to a well-identified sequence, which includes a boom, a crisis, a period of stagnation, and then a new expansion. This sequence tends to repeat itself; but neither the length of the cycle...- ESTABLISHING GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY IN THE ANTI-SWEATSHOP CAMPAIGN: TOWARD A LOGICAL, ACTIVIST APPROACH TO IMPROVING THE WORKING CONDITIONS OF THE POOR, by Ellennita Muetze Hellmer. On College campuses across the country, there has been an escalating uproar concerning labor conditions in less economically developed regions of the world. Many student organizations propose to improve the conditions of the world’s poor by boycotting clothing made under the “sweatshop” conditions...
- THE CORPORATION AT ISSUE, PART I: THE CLASH OF CLASSICAL LIBERAL VALUES AND THE NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES FOR CAPITALIST PRACTICES by Piet-Hein van Eeghen. Walter Block is scathing about Henry Simons’s credentials as a champion of free enterprise. But it seems possible to be considerably more generous to Simons than Block is, and to regard him as significantly less unlibertarian than Block does...
- GOVERNMENTAL INEVITABILITY: REPLY TO HOLCOMBE, by Walter Block. Randy Holcombe’s “Government: Unnecessary but Inevitable” is an interesting and challenging, but ultimately fallacious, essay on government. In his view, this institution is “unnecessary, but inevitable.” I heartily agree with the former contention, but adamantly reject the latter...
- A COMMENT ON COLIN WILLIAMS’S ARGUMENTS AGAINST SPOONER, by Jan Narveson. Williams argues that Lysander Spooner is wrong about the state’s being the “instrument of robbery, slavery, and murder.” He begins by observing, accurately enough, that Spooner’s arguments are constructed of “pure philosophy” and thus require a reply in kind...
- THE DEBATES OF LIBERTY: AN OVERVIEW OF INDIVIDUALIST ANARCHISM, 1881–1908 . By Wendy McElroy. Reviewed by Robert Bass. There was a period in the latter nineteenth century when a distinctively American kind of radicalism flourished, a time when key thinkers could be called, and called themselves, individualists, libertarians, anarchists, and socialists all at once. As individualists and libertarians...
- ON NOZICK. By Edward Feser. Reviewed by J.C. Lester. This book’s main intention is to defend Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia. Its main conclusion is that there is nothing, or next to nothing, wrong with that work. On the way to this conclusion we are given an excellent, though largely uncritical, introduction...