Biographies

Keynes has bamboozled us and it is very difficult to de-bamboozle ourselves.

The point, once more, is not that the conservatives deployed bad arguments against the supposed extremism of Mises and Rothbard. Rather, they downgraded the role of reason as such; and this rendered ineffective their resistance to the Left.

Contrary to popular thinking, the threat posed to the major economies is not the liquidity trap, but the government and central bank stimulus policies aimed at countering it.

Rothbard's discussion of utility constitutes only one strand in his powerfully argued case that Smith derailed economics from the analytical achievements of the scholastics and their French and Italian successors.

There was a German language edition of his profoundly influential General Theory late in 1936, for which Keynes wrote a special foreword addressed solely to German readers.

Although evils exist in both the shared and private forms of a city, it is only in the private form that the virtues of temperance, love, and generosity can be exercised.

Once the war began, Lincoln conducted himself as a thoroughgoing dictator, and DiLorenzo gives a full account of the president's suppression of civil liberties.

If pushed too far, Cowen's line of thought could lead to an undue subjectivism, in which people's perceptions and classifications, rather than what actually occurs, would be the sole issues of importance.

Gray embraces an extreme version of environmentalism, under the guidance of James Lovelock. According to this bizarre view, human beings are in danger of upsetting the Earth, which is viewed not as a mere planet but as a living organism. At times, Gray despairs of human beings altogether and appears a veritable misanthrope.

The battle between Rand and Branden, moreover, is really no contest. Rand created something, whereas Branden has lived his entire life parasitically off Rand, first as a worshipful disciple and cult organizer, then as a neo-Randian shrink who set up shop in California with the solid initial base of the RandCult's Nathaniel Branden Institute mailing list.