By Leonidas Zelmanovitz and Thomas Lanzi
... if we were able to adjust our accounting processes to the realities of taxpayers' obligations, the government deficit which enters into the savings of business and individuals would be offset by taxpayers' liabilities, the fiscal (revenue and expenditure) decision...
By Richard Gunderman
Frontispiece, Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. This article was inspired by a recent Virtual Reading Group on Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, led by Richard Gunderman. Learn more about our Virtual Reading Groups at the Online Library of Liberty. To what field o...
By James Broughel
Book Review of The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions about Inflation, Prices, and Value Create Bad Policy. Ryan A. Bourne, Ed.1 Price controls have grown increasingly common across large sectors of the economy such as finance and healthcare, espec...
By Arnold Kling
Unlike chimpanzees, which acquire the vast majority of their daily calorie intake from easy-to-find foods such as fruit and leaves, early humans occupied a more complex foraging niche, relying on foods they had to either extract (e.g., buried tubers, or nuts i...
By Arnold Kling
Our new model incorporates several innovative features: For example, rather than using a representative household, it features a demographically accurate synthetic population with millions of households (matching age, education, race, and consumption habits). ...
By Jeremy Horpedahl
A Book Review of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt.1 When an academic writes a book for a popular audience, one of their main goals is to have an impact on the world. Jo...
By Erik W. Matson
In 1776, the British MP Soame Jenyns wrote a work titled A View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion.1 The bulk of the work is an apologetic for Christian orthodoxy against the claims of skeptical deism, but it has a notable political dimension. The politi...
By Maria Pia Paganelli
A Book Review of Pricing the Priceless: A History of Environmental Economics, by H. Spencer Banzhaf.1 How do you price scarce and valuable resources that are not traded in a market? Before answering that question, one may need to ask: why do we want to pr...
By Aeon Skoble
Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia was released in 1974, shortly after (and partly in response to) his Harvard colleague John Rawls' 1971 A Theory of Justice. Anarchy, State, and Utopia included a theory of rights and a right-based account of liberalism in the c...
By Alexander William Salter
A Liberty Classics Book Review of Universal Economics, by Armen Alchian and William Allen.1 What do you do when economists stop believing in economics? The "dismal science" never merited its dreary epithet, but trends in economics education at the graduate an...
By Arnold Kling
This book is about how the world's religions have gained such power, what they do with it, and how abuses of this power can be constrained. —Paul Seabright, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People,1 p. 6 Paul Seabright's T...
By Richard Gunderman
Thomas Stearns Eliot. Photo by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1934. Although the most illustrious honors in economics, such as the Nobel Prize, are typically awarded to specialists in the field, many of the most penetrating economic insights do not come from economists. To l...
By Vlad Tarko
Elinor Ostrom Introduction The commons are the typical example in which self-interested individual actions do not aggregate into beneficial collective outcomes, as judged by members of the community themselves. They are the main counter-example to Adam Smith's log...
By John Estill
While much has been written about entrepreneurship in business and economics publications, much less has been written about entrepreneurial failure. Some writers in the popular press have interesting things to say, such as Megan McArdle's The Up Side of Down: Why Failin...
By Paul Forrester
Henry George A Liberty Classics Book Review of Progress and Poverty, by Henry George.1 Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879) was among the most important and widely read books published in the 19th century, but George's work and the single tax movemen...
By Art Carden
A Liberty Classic Book Review of Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour by Helmut Schoeck.1 I've been such a fool, Vassili. Man will always be man. There is no new man. We tried so hard to create a society that is equal, where there'd be nothing to ...