Daily Articles

Book Review: The Making of Modern Economics

by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 2001

The Making of Modern Economics: The Lives and Ideas of the Great Thinkers by Mark Skousen (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2001); 485 pages; $25. IN THE EARLY DECADES OF THE 19TH CENTURY, Thomas Carlyle was the first one to call economics “the dismal science.” He considered the study of the market economy “dismal” because it emphasized individualism and freedom of association ...

Drug-War Killings in Peru

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 2001

IN APRIL, two more innocent people were killed in the U.S government’s 30-year war on drugs. This time, the victims were a 35-year-old missionary named Veronica Bowers and her 7-month-old baby, Charity, who were flying in a small Cessna from Brazil to Peru with Bowers’s husband, another of their children, and the pilot. After a CIA plane issued an alert ...

John Stuart Mill and the Three Dangers to Liberty

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 2001

JOHN STUART MILL’S 1859 ESSAY “On Liberty” is one of the most enduring and powerful defenses of individual freedom ever penned. Both advocates and enemies of personal freedom have challenged either the premises or the logic in Mill’s argument. They have pointed out inconsistencies or incompleteness in his reasoning. But the ...

Don’t Fund Religious Groups

by Sheldon Richman June 1, 2001

President Bush just doesn’t get it. He may say, repeatedly, that the surplus belongs to the people and push for a modest tax cut, but if he really believed his own words, he wouldn’t be proposing to spend the taxpayers’ money on social-welfare activities performed by religious organizations. Mr. ...

Save Immigrants: Tear Down Our Wall

by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 2001

On the heels of his recent regret for the drug-war deaths in Peru of a missionary and her baby, President Bush has now expressed condolences for the deaths of 14 Mexican citizens on the Arizona desert. The men died of thirst and exposure after crossing into the United ...

Free Markets Aren’t Conservative

by Sheldon Richman June 1, 2001

One of the great myths of the Industrial Age is that businessmen generally like free markets. That myth has deep implications and consequences. For example, someone who buys into it will tend to believe that proposals to deregulate markets are simply favors for special interests and inimical to the interests ...

Send Chainsaws to AID

by James Bovard June 1, 2001

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION is earnestly seeking to reform scores of federal programs after the scandal-ridden Clinton years. But sometimes there is no substitute for a good chainsaw massacre. Such is the case with foreign aid. The U.S. is now giving $15 billion a year in foreign aid — economic and military ...

The Free-Soil Movement, Part 2

by Wendy McElroy June 1, 2001

Part 1 |Part 2 The key issue around which the free-soil debate revolved was slavery. Specifically, the question was whether slavery would be extended into the territories that were expected to seek statehood. Both anti-slavery farmers and slave-owners had been migrating into the territories for years. Each group was eager to acquire the political clout that came from having a ...

Book Review: The Burden of Bad Ideas

by George Leef June 1, 2001

The Burden of Bad Ideas by Heather Mac Donald (Chicago, Ill.: Ivan R. Dee, 2000); 242 pages; $26. WE HAVE ALL HAD our share of bad ideas. Most of the time, we discard them before acting on them, but when we do act on a bad idea, we usually realize quickly that it was ...

Book Review: Regulation without the State

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 2001

Regulation without the State ... The Debate Continues by John Blundell and Colin Robinson (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 2000); 93 pages; $15. ALMOST 40 YEARS AGO, free-market economist and Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman published a short book entitled Capitalism and Freedom (1962). At a time during which Keynesian economics and the popularity of the interventionist-welfare state were still on the ...

War Crimes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 2, 2001

Reports of killings of noncombatants during the Vietnam and Korean Wars have recently caused Americans to reflect upon the concept of war crimes, and specifically those committed by their own military forces. But why stop with those two wars? Why not use the opportunity to revisit what U.S. military forces did to the Japanese at ...

The Declaration and the Constitution

by Jacob G. Hornberger May 1, 2001

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION was one of the most remarkable periods in history, not so much for the military battles that were fought but for the ideas and principles that were expressed during that time. Foremost among the documents expressing those ideas and principles are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which are inexorably intertwined. Throughout history, people have viewed ...