I’ve just finished reading Leo Tolstoy’s remarkable book The Kingdom of God Is Within You. This was written in Russian and completed in 1893, but the Russian censors forbade its publication. It circulated in unpublished form in Russia, however, and was soon translated into other languages and published abroad. It had substantial influence on...
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There are now many more libertarians in the world than there were fifty years ago. Libertarian writing has increased greatly, and the readership of libertarian literature has increased substantially, especially since the development and widespread adoption of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Yet, it seems to me, we no longer have libertarians...
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Economics provides a powerful framework for understanding what goes on in the marketplace, the voting booth, the family, the community, and every other sphere of social activity. Its greatest teachers—from before Adam Smith on down to the present—have always impressed upon the public their discipline’s explanatory powers and importance for human well-being. In his...
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With so much press coverage of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel Prize in economics has not been discussed much. I am an economist, but I’m not really complaining. The other prizes haven’t received much press coverage either, and most people don’t have that much interest in economics anyway. (That’s not to say they’re...
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Just when it looked like statism was in an unchallenged political trajectory in the U.S. and Europe, the classical liberal President of the Czech Republic, Dr. Václav Klaus, stands to become the next President of the European Union, the world’s biggest trading bloc. Needless to say, those who F. A. Hayek dubbed “the socialists...
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According to a news report about Paul Krugman’s selection to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences: Commenting on the global economic meltdown, Krugman told a news conference in Stockholm by telephone from the United States that some of his research was linked to currency crises and related issues. “This is terrifying,” he...
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Imprimis, the newsletter of Hillsdale College, was once an important part of the libertarian/conservative literary canon, with contributions from people like Henry Hazlitt, Arthur Shenfield, F. A. Hayek, Ben Rogge, Erik Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, M. E. Bradford, Russell Kirk, Malcolm Muggeridge, Forrest McDonald, Sidney Hook, and James Buchanan. Hayek’s important essay, “Coping with Ignorance,”...
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This piece is the pro argument in our two-post debate on Roe v. Wade and Abortion. You can find the con argument, written by Graham H. Walker in response to this piece, here. The Supreme Court’s decision to hear an appeal from Mississippi’s restrictive abortion law raises questions and concerns regarding the longstanding desire...
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Advocates of reparations for the descendants of African American slaves recently challenged socialist Bernie Sanders to embrace their cause, which he refused to do. A leading advocate of reparations, Atlantic contributor Ta-Nehisi Coates, criticizes Sanders for placing class-based politics before race. Lost in the unending debate over reparations is a key point: group reparations ignore the...
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In their most recent elections, the people of Venezuela voted to oust many of their elected officials. Just hours after the polls closed, the National Electoral Council reported that the opposition party had won 99 seats in the Venezuelan government. These results generated much excitement, not just in Venezuela, but internationally. Many pointed to...
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