Independent Review articles from June 1997

Independent Review archives from June 1997

Autonomy and automobility. (positive side of automobile use)
June 22, 1997... Years before the automobile evolved into a transportation necessity, before multilaned asphalt replaced meandering muddy ruts, intrepidly pioneering motorists took to the roads for pleasure. Today tens of millions drive for pleasure, but...

Curb rights: eliciting competition and entrepreneurship in urban transit.
June 22, 1997... Urban transit in the United States has long been dominated by government ownership and regulation, and has been declining steadily in ridership and productivity (APTA 1995). An economist-cum-policymaker would seek to inject competition and...

Preventing banking crises in the future: lessons from past mistakes.
June 22, 1997... Almost every country -- large or small, developed or developing, free market or planned, free enterprise or socialistic, democratic or authoritarian, western or eastern, northern or southern -- has experienced serious banking (depository...

Nikolai Bukharin and the New Economic Policy: a middle way? (Soviet leader's policies during the 1920s)
June 22, 1997... Socialists have long searched for a "middle way" between the free markets of capitalism and the hypercentralization of a Soviet-style command economy. In the late 1980s Soviet reformers returned to the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s...

The ambitious, accommodative Adam Smith. (18th century Scottish economist and free trade advocate)
June 22, 1997... If the cause of liberty needs saints to be made palatable, then the arguments for liberty may be in deep trouble. Unmindful of this point, biographies of Adam Smith suggest that any attack on the saintliness of Smith's character sullies the...

Wreaking Hobbes on mankind. (British philosopher Thomas Hobbes)
June 22, 1997... For a long time I've wondered why so many intelligent, worthy people remain darkly skeptical of arguments for more freedom and less government. They shake their heads and smile that world-weary you're-so-naive smile, not focusing on the...

Utilitarianism As a Public Philosophy.
June 22, 1997... Robert Goodin is a political philosopher at the Research School of Social Sciences of the Australian National University. Here he pulls together seventeen previously published articles, slightly edited. A new introduction carries the same...

Against the Imperial Judiciary: The Supreme Court vs. the Sovereignty of the People.
June 22, 1997... The role of the Supreme Court under the United States Constitution has been a source of controversy since the framing of that document. The reason is that no provision of the Constitution accords the Supreme Court a review power over the other...

The Myth of American Individualism.
June 22, 1997... Celebration of the nation's bicentennial touched off a lively reappraisal of the American founding era. From the events leading to the declaration of American independence in 1776 to the arguments over the adoption of the U.S. Constitution in...

Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War.
June 22, 1997... In Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, a professor of history and economics at Golden Gate University, presents a short, readable, and reliable history of the Civil War. Several chapters are devoted to the political...

From the Outside In: World War II and the American State.
June 22, 1997... The major theme of From the Outside In is that "states make war; wars make states" (p. 3). The book describes how World War 11 affected the growth of the federal government in four different areas: social security, public finance,...

Oil, Gas, and Government: The U.S. Experience, 2 vols.
June 22, 1997... About fifteen years ago, when memory of the energy crises of the 1970s remained fresh in everyone's mind and the inevitability of future energy crises was the unchallenged premise of public policy, I decided to write a book about the causes of...

Plowing Ground in Washington: The Political Economy of U.S. Agriculture.
June 22, 1997... In Plowing Ground, Del Gardner presents an extensive, well-reasoned critique of U.S. agriculture programs that is accessible to a wide range of potential readers. He writes primarily for educated laypersons, seeking to give them a better...

The Failure of Antitrust and Regulation to Establish Competition in Long-Distance Telephone Services.
June 22, 1997... AT&T's absolute monopoly of the supply of switched long-distance telephone services ended in 1976 with the rollout of MCI's outlaw Execunet offering. Twenty years later, economists are questioning whether AT&T remains able to influence the...

The End of Welfare: Fighting Poverty in the Civil Society.
June 22, 1997... Michael Tanner, the director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, has aptly titled his new book The End of Welfare. He is not alluding to President Clinton's pledge to 'end welfare as we known it" but to his own preferred...

Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case.
June 22, 1997... In this concise, insightful, and inadvertently amusing book, Marcia Angell chronicles the background and history of the silicone breast implant debacle. In lucid language that both lay readers and scholars can appreciate, Angell shows that...