[This review of Paul Samuelson’s Ninth edition of his famous textbook Economics is reprinted from The Wall Street Review of Books (December 1973): “A Review of Paul Samuelson, Economics, 9th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973)”; and The Logic of Action II (Edward Elgar, 1997, pp. 254–59. Samuelson’s Economics is now in its 17 th edition.] Reviewing
I come to bury Reaganomics, not to praise it. How well has Reaganomics achieved its own goals? Perhaps the best way of discovering those goals is to recall the heady days of Ronald Reagan’s first campaign for the presidency, especially before his triumph at the Republican National Convention in 1980. In general terms, Reagan pledged to return, or
The student of economics is invariably taught a certain mythology about the history of the study of business cycles. That mythology holds (a) that before 1913, nobody realized that there are cycles of prosperity and depression in the economy—instead, everyone thought only of isolated crises or panics, and (b) that this all changed with the advent
[This lively essay appeared in James H. Weaver, ed., Modern Political Economy (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1973), pp. 419–30, as chapter 28; it followed an essay by Professor Robert T. Averitt, to which Rothbard refers once or twice in his piece.] In order to discuss the “future of capitalism,” we must first decide what the meaning of the term
Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is a farrago of confusions, absurdities, fallacies, and distorted attacks on the free market. The temptation is to engage in almost a line-by-line critique. I will abjure this to first set out some of the basic philosophic and economic flaws, before going into some of the detailed criticisms. One basic
This article is taken from chapter 20 of The Ethics of Liberty . It is often contended that the existence of extreme, or “lifeboat,” situations disproves any theory of absolute property rights, or indeed of any absolute rights of self-ownership whatsoever. It is claimed that since any theory of individual rights seems to break down or works
Every “radical” creed has been subjected to the charge of being “utopian,” and the libertarian movement is no exception. Some libertarians themselves maintain that we should not frighten people off by being “too radical,” and that therefore the full libertarian ideology and program should be kept hidden from view. These people counsel a “Fabian”
[Republican administrations often pose moral and practical questions for libertarians, insofar as many jobs become available in government, whether directly employed by the White House, or regulatory agencies, as a writers and intellectuals. Is it right or wrong to accept such jobs? And regardless of who is in power, many free market economists
The Alleged Superiority of the Income Tax Orthodox neoclassical economics has long maintained that, from the point of view of the taxed themselves, an income tax is “better than” an excise tax on a particular form of consumption, since, in addition to the total revenue extracted, which is assumed to be the same in both cases, the excise tax
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