Economics

Concretizes the selfishness-enabling nature of capitalism and shows why this feature makes it the only moral social system on earth.

Raymond C. Niles replies to a letter about the California power grid.

Eric Daniels reviews The Tyranny of the Market: Why You Can't Always Get What You Want, by Joel Waldfogel.

Eric Daniels reviews Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

Elan Journo reviews Mugged by Reality: The Liberation of Iraq and the Failure of Good Intentions, by John Agresto

Identifies the cause of America's two-decade swing to the right, explains why this cause was philosophically insufficient to sustain the movement toward capitalism, and indicates what Americans must understand if we want to resume the trek toward freedom, armed with the means to sustain it.

Examines the inception and rise of Standard Oil, demonstrates that the company’s immense success was the result not of so-called “anti-competitive” practices or “predatory pricing” but of its superior efficiency and productivity, and does long-overdue justice to one of the greatest producers of life-serving values in history: John D. Rockefeller.

In connection with Yaron Brook’s essay “The Morality of Moneylending,” Edward Glaeser’s NY Sun op-ed “Vilifying Lenders” is a hopeful sign. Glaeser makes some good points: Not so long ago, banks were routinely vilified for not lending to the less fortunate. Over the past 15 years, a revolution in credit…

Presents an essentialized history of usury, showing that, just as moneylenders are being damned and blamed for today's "sub-prime mortgage crisis," so they have been condemned and castigated for alleged wrongdoing from the beginning of Western civilization. Brook zeros in on the economic and moral premises that give rise to contempt for this profession; he identifies the moral-practical dichotomy inherent in these ideas; and he discusses a unified set of principles that must be understood and embraced if moneylending is to be seen as the noble business that it actually is.

Analyzes Bernard H. Siegan’s Economic Liberties and the Constitution, showing the first edition of the book (not the second edition) to be a valuable source for those seeking to understand how legal protections for property rights in America were gradually lost. Salzman also shows that, although Economic Liberties has certain virtues and is one of the best scholarly books on the subject, it fails to provide a proper philosophical grounding of property rights, and thus cannot stand on its own in defense thereof.