Book Reviews

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.

Lew Rockwell reviews a newly released collection of Neil McCaffrey's letters and other writings, which reveal his relationships with members of the early libertarian movement such as Murray Rothbard.

The task that civil rights laws were meant to carry out—the top-down management of various ethnic, regional, and social groups—had always been the main task of empires. The US now imposes this both domestically and globally.

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas is a lively history of the astonishing influence prewar Viennese intellectuals had on the greater world, and continue to have in areas far beyond economics.

We don’t let just anyone repair our homes or perform surgery. So why do we let everyone vote, and, theoretically, let just anyone rule? Jason Brennan’s recommendation is epistocracy: the rule of the knowledgeable.

Hazlitt and all of the other critics of Keynes never did get to the primary points with respect to what was wrong with Keynes. One point was theoretical. The other was practical.