Book Reviews

In the 1960s, politicians and bureaucrats had nearly unbounded faith in the ability to plan a nearly perfect society. Things didn't turn out as they had planned.

Yasushi’s fine introduction to libertarianism—a phrase which is translated even more provocatively as “ultra-do-whatever-you-want-ism” (jiyūshijōshugi)—has turned out to be one of this year’s steady sellers in Japan.

According to Philippon, in some industries Europe has a freer market than America does. The solution is somehow more regulation.

Binyamin Appelbaum, the main writer on economics for the New York Times, thinks that economics was appropriately progressive—favoring severe market restrictions—in the first half of the twentieth century. All this changed in the fifties.

The editors are to be heartily congratulated for putting together this book, which covers an impressive range of topics in monetary economics from an explicitly Austrian perspective.

Lawson and Powell have had the happy idea of presenting elementary economics in a humorous way that will appeal to those “turned off” by serious and sober scholarship.

David Gordon reviews John Quiggin's "Economics in Two Lessons," an effort to correct Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" by adding "important truths about the limitations of the market."

Buckley does an excellent job of outlining the problems with large centralized states. But he ends up calling for “secession lite,” that is to say, mere devolution of power to the states and localities. I wish he had moved in the other direction and explored the ways people can solve their problems without resort to the state.

Professor Arkadiusz Sieroń has written an important new book on the Cantillon effect, indicating that the effect of new money on the economy depends on where it is injected.

Rothbard took the American Revolution to be mainly libertarian in its inspiration, but he contends that the libertarian impulses of the Revolution were betrayed by a centralizing coup d’état. If Rothbard is right, the Constitution as written provides ample scope for tyranny.