From a review of Doug Irwin’s important new book Peddling Protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression (Princeton University Press, 2011): Hoover had famously received a petition signed by 1,028 economists urging him to veto the bill. Then as now, economists were held in warm regard by Congress; Senator Samuel Shortridge remarked: “I am not...
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In a recent article, the Wall Street Journal quotes Mark Zuckerberg, the kid from Harvard who heads the CEO of a company-not-yet-public. (Goldman-Sachs VIP insiders only, please). What disturbed me about the article is not that another company is breaking into the so-called China market after the Google row over censorship. I’m more disturbed...
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Here is Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs speaking on “Ethanol Subsidies Have Many Bad Consequences,” from the Mises Circle seminar, “Agricultural Subsidies: Down on the D.C. Farm,” held May 14th in Indianapolis. Download audio file (27:51 minutes) Please also see the following books: Plowshares & Pork Barrels: The Political Economy of Agriculture, by...
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This summer, the Independent Institute is excited to host “The Challenge of Liberty”, two student seminar programs, one geared toward college students and the other for high school students. The high school session runs from June 20 to 24 at our offices in Oakland and the college program will be held at a Bay...
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As the “big three” U.S. auto manufacturers have lost market share—and two of the three have gone into bankruptcy, only to be rescued by the federal government—foreign manufacturers have filled the void. Many of those foreign auto manufacturers now make many of the cars they sell in the U.S. in U.S. factories. The United...
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Recently, I have written a couple of short op-eds (see here and here) arguing that commerce, to the Framers and ratifiers of the Constitution, did not mean economic activity, gainful activity, etc. It means trade–among the states or with foreign nations, or with Indians. The purpose of the interstate Commerce Clause, which should guide interpretation, is creation of...
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Independent Institute Senior Fellow Alvaro Vargas Llosa was interviewed at Pepperdine University. Download mp3 file. Also, please see the following books from him: Liberty for Latin America: How to Undo Five Hundred Years of State Oppression The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty Lessons from the Poor: Triumph of the Entrepreneurial Spirit

A long, long time ago . . . I can still remember, Mainstream theory used to make me smile. And I knew if I had my chance That I could make equations dance And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while. But Joseph Stiglitz made me shiver With every paper he’d deliver. Bad news...
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A new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco confirms research by Independent Institute scholars that immigrants improve the U.S. economy as a whole, including employment prospects and wages for native-born Americans: total immigration to the United States from 1990 to 2007 was associated with a 6.6% to 9.9% increase in real...
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Robert A. Lawson and I just published our paper “Human Rights and Economic Liberalization” in Business and Politics. The paper can be downloaded here. Here’s the abstract: Using several case studies and data from the Economic Freedom of the World annual report and from the CIRI Human Rights Data Project, we estimate the effect...
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