Taxes Have Consequences: An Income Tax History of the United States By Arthur B. Laffer, Brian Domitrovic, and Jeanne Cairns Sinquefield Post Hill Press, 2022, xxv + 413 pp. Taxes Have Consequences is a good book that could have been better. The authors are leading defenders of “supply side” economics, which attracted much attention during the
Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less By Alex Epstein Portfolio 2022 xii + 468 pp. In his remarkable new book, Alex Epstein has changed the terms of the debate about the danger of “global warming” and the alleged need to take drastic action in response to this. One side assures us that we
Nigel Biggar, a recently retired professor of theology at Oxford University, has never shunned controversy, as the title of one of his books, In Defence of War , suggests. In this week’s column, I’d like to examine an article of his, “ A Christian Defense of American Empire ,” that appeared in the October 2022 issue of First Things . As you might
Radley Balko, a defender of liberty best known for his book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces , has been fired by the Washington Post . Balko writes: “ So after nine years, I’m being let go by the Washington Post. This is disappointing but not surprising. In recent years, the Opinion leadership has made it
Is praxeology inconsistent? Praxeologists criticize neoclassical economists for using false assumptions in their models. For example, neoclassicals acknowledge that the conditions for “perfect competition” are never found in the actual world. Firms selling a good such as wheat may not have much control over price, but they aren’t perfect “price
Matt McManus, a lecturer at the University of Michigan, has published in Jacobin an article under the less-than-engaging title “Ludwig von Mises Was a Free-Market Ideologue, Not a Hardheaded Thinker.” In the article, McManus raises some points of philosophical interest, but unfortunately his evident animus against Mises interferes with his
Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities by Ryan McMaken Mises Institute, 2022, 230 pp. Those of us who think that there should be no state at all, or at most a very limited one, must view all existing states with dissatisfaction, though some are better than others. In assessing how good or bad a state
Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed by Andrew Koppelman St. Martin’s Press, 2022, 320 pp. Andrew Koppelman, a distinguished legal academic who teaches law and political science at Northwestern University, has a quality that few of his fellow academics possess. He is able to find merit in views he
In last week’s column, I mentioned that regulation of drugs was among the important subjects Andrew Koppelman discusses in his thoughtful book Burning Down the House , and this week I’d like to look at what he has to say on this topic. To understand his arguments, though, what he says needs to be put in a wider philosophical framework. As he sees
In the early decades of the Cold War, the Lutheran theologian Reinhold Niebuhr attracted a considerable following among American intellectuals who influenced foreign policy. People such as the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who wanted to found a group called Atheists for Niebuhr, maintained that Niebuhr provided a new, realistic basis for
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.