Major Contributions by Friedrich Hayek by Future of Freedom Foundation August 3, 2023 In this week's Libertarian Angle, Jacob and Richard discuss some of the major intellectual contributions made by libertarian Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek. Go to the podcast. Please subscribe to our email newsletter FFF Daily here.
Macaulay and My 75-Cent Epiphanies, Part 1 by James Bovard August 1, 2023 Part 1 | Part 2 Fearing that my writing style was becoming anemic, I recently sought a literary booster shot from my bookshelves. Happily, a dozen volumes of Thomas Macaulay awaited me. Macaulay made history mesmerizing, and I have been captivated by his speed, grace, and wit for 40 years. Nobody would mistake my shelf of Macaulay books for leather-bound collector items. In 1981, I picked up a four-volume set of his essays for 75 cents from a “discard” book sale outside McKeldin Library on the University of Maryland campus. Those volumes were too ratty for a cat to drag into a house. Two of the volumes had cracked spines and were held together with masking tape. Having been raised in the mountains of Virginia, I knew exactly how to upgrade them. I replaced the masking tape with duct tape. Having a “library discard” set zapped any hesitation to annotate the hell out of the crinkly old pages. This was a ...
A Malignant, Dysfunctional Monetary System by Jacob G. Hornberger May 3, 2023 When a monetary policy measures its success by how much economic devastation it is producing, that’s a good sign that that is one malignant, dysfunctional system. But that is precisely what the Federal Reserve is doing with its policy of rapid, dramatic interest-rate increases. It measures the success of its program by how many people and businesses, especially in the housing industry, it is driving into bankruptcy. The more, the better. So long as people and businesses are doing well, the Fed will continue raising interest rates until it can succeed in putting more people and more businesses down. The quirk in the Fed’s policy is that this time around, the Fed’s “tightening" policy is adversely impacting the banking industry. The Federal Reserve consists of bankers. It’s one thing when building contractors go out of business or people default on their home mortgages. No big deal as far as the Fed is concerned. That’s a sign that ...
How Evil Are Politicians? Part 1 by George Leef May 1, 2023 Part 1 | Part 2 How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery by Bryan Caplan (Bet On It Books, 2022) If you are a libertarian, or just someone with a streak of skepticism about government, you will enjoy and profit from reading How Evil are Politicians? The author, Bryan Caplan, is a professor of economics at George Mason ...
Those Scary and Dangerous Russkies by Jacob G. Hornberger April 20, 2023 It was always inevitable that the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s “war on terrorism” would begin fizzling out, especially as the number of foreigners they were killing significantly diminished. When U.S. forces got booted out of Afghanistan and began killing significantly less people in Iraq, the rage that motivates terrorists to strike began going down. That’s undoubtedly why ...
Philip Wicksteed on the Common Sense of Choice and the Market Process by Richard M. Ebeling April 1, 2023 The British economist Philip H. Wicksteed began his most important work, The Common Sense of Political Economy (1910), with a motto taken from the famous German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832): “We all live it, but few of us know what we are living.” Contrary to the classical economists, who had argued that the market value of things was ...
The Prescience of FFF’s 2022 Monetary Conference by Jacob G. Hornberger March 21, 2023 Little did we know when we held our online conference last fall how prescient it would be. The conference was entitled “End Inflation and the Fed.” It featured some of the most competent libertarian and Austrian economics speakers giving their perspectives on the monetary, banking, and fiscal difficulties facing our nation. As most everyone knows, our ...
The Life and Significance of F. A. Hayek by Richard M. Ebeling February 1, 2023 Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950 by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger, (University of Chicago Press, 2022) People who knew Friedrich A. Hayek before he won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974 sometimes said that he went through bouts of depression that interrupted his research and writing. Some also said that he could be aloof and distant when ...
There Is No Anarchy on the U.S.-Mexico Border by Jacob G. Hornberger January 4, 2023 Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial about Republican Congressman Kevin McCarthy’s so-far failed bid to become Speaker of the House, which stated the following: "Voters elected a Republican House to … investigate the anarchy at the southern border." Anarchy? I thought “anarchy” meant the absence of government. Are the members of the Journal’s editorial board ...
Lionel Robbins on the Logic of Choice and a Liberal International Order by Richard M. Ebeling January 1, 2023 It is probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that British economist Lionel Robbins (1898–1984) was one of the most influential economists of the last hundred years without most economists, nowadays, being aware of it. This is all because of a relatively short book that he published over 90 years ago, An Essay on the Nature and ...
The Fed’s Destructive Guessing Game by Jacob G. Hornberger December 15, 2022 As expected, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by half a point yesterday. It was a drop from the .75 point rate increases that the Fed has been implementing for the past several months. A big reason the Fed is going slower is the longstanding fear among Fed officials of bringing about another Great Depression by raising ...
