Independent Review articles from September 1998

Independent Review archives from September 1998

Is Microsoft a monopolist?
September 22, 1998... The Microsoft monopoly is self-evident, if the Justice Department's lawyers are to be believed. In the complaint filed against Microsoft in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia on May 18, 1998, the Justice Department declares...

Let's toss for it: a surprising curb on political greed.
September 22, 1998... But anyone who deliberately tries to get himself elected to a public office [in Utopia] is permanently disqualified from holding one. Thomas More, Utopia Nowadays elections are almost universally regarded as the keystone of...

How big a budget do the people prefer?
September 22, 1998... Adherents of democratic political philosophies agree that the people's preferences are a vital ingredient for making rational public budgetary decisions. The claim by prominent analysts of public opinion, for example, that "now most Americans...

Revolutionary armies, labor unions, and free-riders: organization, labor unions, and free-riders.
September 22, 1998... Three paradoxes inspired me to write this article: (1) Activists within groups such as revolutionary armies and labor unions often make extraordinary sacrifices even when they receive the same benefits as do nonactivists. (2) Groups often seek...

The great centralizer: Abraham Lincoln and the War between the States.
September 22, 1998... By the 1850s the authority of all government in America was at a low point; government to the American was, at most, merely an institution with a negative role, a guardian of fair play. David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered ...

Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776.
September 22, 1998... By Walter A. McDougall Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Pp. 286. $26.00. As the title suggests, in this work Walter McDougall, professor of international relations at Penn and Pulitzer prize winner, examines the whole history of...

Property and Freedom: The Constitution, the Courts, and Land-Use Regulation.
September 22, 1998... By Bernard H. Siegan New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1997. Pp. 275. $34.95 cloth, $21.95 paper. Some years ago, I was asked by the editor of a regional magazine in New England to research a small piece of social history, that of...

Justice Stephen Field: Shaping Liberty from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age.
September 22, 1998... By Paul Kens Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. Pp. viii, 376. $39.95. Paul Kens has written a lively, entertaining, and scholarly intellectual biography of one of the most fascinating justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, Stephen J....

Mobilizing for Modern War: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1865-1919.
September 22, 1998... By Paul A. C. Koistinen Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. Pp. xiii, 391. $45.00. Total war has been the costliest pastime of the total state in the twentieth century. Recognizing war as "the health of the state," modern...

American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition.
September 22, 1998... By Kenneth D. Rose New York: New York University Press, 1996. Pp. 230. $16.95 paper. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, groups of Americans joined together to baffle the evils of liquor. Some, like the Washingtonians in the 1820s and...

Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age.
September 22, 1998... By Margot A. Henriksen Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Pp. 475. $34.95. Dr. Strangelove's America tries to show that the invention of the atomic bomb had revolutionary political and cultural effects on American society. That...

Political Cycles and the Macroeconomy.
September 22, 1998... By Alberto Alesina and Nouriel Roubini with Gerald D. Cohen Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Pp. xii, 296. $20.00. More than two decades ago, articles by William Nordhaus and by Douglas Hibbs launched the systematic study of the relationship...

Institutions and Economic Theory: The Contribution of the New Institutional Economics.
September 22, 1998... By Eirik G. Furubotn and Rudolf Richter Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Pp. xv, 542. $65.00 cloth. Written by two leading authors in the area, this major work explores at length the "new institutional economics." Research in...

What Professor Stiglitz learned in Washington. (Joseph E. Stiglitz, Washington, D.C.)
September 22, 1998... Joseph E. Stiglitz is a major figure in the mainstream economics establishment. Having been a faculty member at Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, a prolific publisher in the leading academic journals, and the recipient of prestigious honors and...