Robert Heilbroner was the most famous American socialist intellectual of the 20th century. His The Worldly Philosophers sold millions, making it the second-best-selling economics textbook of all time. In my Business and Economic Ethics course, we read and discuss one of his articles. Here is Heilbroner, writing in 1980, about who owns what under socialism: […]
Robert Heilbroner on socialism’s mandatory labor Read More »
From this WSJ review of Abigail Carroll’s Three Squares, a book about American eating habits across the centuries, here are two eyebrow-raising excerpts. 1. In 1744, a traveler was invited to eat a meal with a ferryman and his family. The traveler describes it this way in his journal: “They had no cloth upon the
Are you rich enough to own a chair? Colonial American eating habits Read More »
“When you lay out a picnic, you get ants. When you hand out more wealth through government, you get lobbyists. The federal budget is the biggest picnic in history.” That amusingly perfect analogy is from page 241 of Boaz’s The Libertarian Mind.
David Boaz on lobbyists Read More »
Ronald Hamowy has died. He was a student of Friedrich Hayek’s, educated at the University of Chicago, historian, libertarian, Cato fellow, and emeritus professor at the University of Alberta in Canada. I knew him slightly as my editor when I wrote the article on “The Enlightenment” for The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, which he published with
Ronald Hamowy, R.I.P. Read More »
I will be giving a series of three lectures this coming week in Washington, D.C. at the “Liberty and Current Issues” seminar sponsored jointly by the Cato Institute and the Institute for Humane Studies. The titles of my three talks are: * Classical Liberal Thought & Political Economy * Entrepreneurship, Markets & Morality * Philosophy,
Three talks at Cato-IHS seminar Read More »
11/30 Why were Enron’s Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling convicted? Professor Larry Ribstein argues that Is there a rational basis for determinism? And in Spiked, Stuart Derbyshire surveys the state of brain science and free will and argues that women in India. (Thanks to Virginia for the link.) Prospect magazine has this fascinating overview (statist
Worth Reading for November 2007 Read More »
8/31 Is Wal-Mart the we’re much, much wealthier than in 1967. 8/30 James Lileks explains how to get your postmodern 15 minutes (and a government grant): the integration of light in painting. 8/28 Keeping up with some influential philosophers: Simon Blackburn on the appeal across 2.5 millenia of Spinoza’s vision of reason; and 2006 being
Worth Reading for August 2006 Read More »