The Stupidity of War: American Foreign Policy and the Case for Complacency by John Mueller Cambridge University Press, 2021, 332 pp. The subtitle of John Mueller’s excellent new book suggests that something unusual is in store for the reader. If someone is called complacent, he is hardly being complimented; how, then, can there be a “case for
Critics of praxeology often claim that it is isn’t really one of the sciences. It isn’t about the empirical world but is mere idle play with words. In this week’s column, I’d like to look at some remarks that the philosopher and linguistics scholar Jerrold Katz makes about rationalism and empiricism in his important and controversial book Language
One thing struck me as especially odd about Google’s ban of LewRockwell.com from its advertising program. This was the claim that articles on this site could “undermine participation or trust in electoral or democratic process.” I suppose what is meant is that the site has published articles that suggest there was substance to President Trump’s
The famous French socialist economist Thomas Piketty thinks we aren’t moving toward equality fast enough. In his Long Live Socialism! , he says this to illustrate how much work remains to be done: ”The poorest 50% of the world’s population is still the poorest 50% of the world’s population” (p.13 of the Amazon Kindle
Purchasing Submission: Conditions, Power, and Freedom by Philip Hamburger Harvard University Press, 2021, 320 pp. Philip Hamburger has made a revolutionary contribution to American constitutional law. He shows that what is often regarded as a narrow topic, “unconstitutional conditions,” of interest only to specialists, is in fact fundamental to
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
Ludwig von Mises has some characteristically acute and important comments on the idea of progress in history, and in what follows, I’d like to address some of these. In the way he develops his views, one of the key themes of his notion of ethics plays an important role. In contrast to those, like Herbert Spencer, who think that human history is
Last month I reviewed Samuel Moyn’s Humane (New York, 2021) but discussed only a few topics in it. Owing to the book’s great importance, I’d like in what follows to address another issue as well, and this is something with which many readers will already be familiar. The principal theme of Moyn’s book, it will be recalled, is that efforts to make
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
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.