Independent Review articles

Recent articles from Independent Review

Some problems with spontaneous order.(Critical essay)
June 22, 2009... F. A. Hayek's famous observations about the nature of social order are a cornerstone of much conservative and libertarian thought. Hayek's arguments are frequently cited not only as a useful description of how social orders evolve, but also to support normative positions about the...

With friends like these, who needs enemies? Aiding the world's worst dictators.(Essay)
June 22, 2009... On April 2, 2008, the Zimbabwe Election Committee publicly confirmed that President Robert Mugabe and his party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), had lost control of the Parliament to the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, and its leader...

The modern health care maze: development and effects of the four-party system.(Essay)
June 22, 2009... Our national health care system is so dauntingly complex that reform efforts seem hopelessly adrift. How should we proceed in reforming that system? As a rule, any "realistic" reform project must begin with a survey of its principal stakeholders. A stakeholder, by definition, is any party who...

Selling slave families down the river: property rights and the public auction.(Essay)
June 22, 2009... Historians, sociologists, and economists have long emphasized the detrimental effects of slave owners' power to sell their slaves and in the process separate husband from wife, parent from child, and relatives and friends from one another. This power to break up slave families was certainly a...

Entrepreneurship and growth: a Latin American paradox?(Essay)
June 22, 2009... In recent Latin American history, economists have advanced many different recipes to promote the region's economic growth. Given these differences of professional opinion and the region's on-again, off-again development, populism and political instability have been frequent responses to...