Independent Review articles from September 2007

Independent Review archives from September 2007

Unprophetic Tocqueville: how Democracy in America got the modern world completely wrong.(Alexis de Tocqueville)
September 22, 2007... Over the past few decades, as Karl Marx was thrown into the dustbin, Alexis de Tocqueville came surging back from the graveyard of intellectual history. Tocqueville's main claim to fame is as the author of Democracy in America, which was...

What ended the Great Depression? It was not World War II.
September 22, 2007... There are two prominent views about what ended the Great Depression. The most widely accepted one by far emphasizes U.S. entry into World War II, with its attendant government spending for armaments. (1) According to this view, the U.S. economy...

The attrition of urban real-property rights.
September 22, 2007... Local governments have become such dictators of urban land use that they make a mockery, of the notion that the United States is characterized by private urban real-property markets. Courts have enabled the dictatorship by giving governments...

Property rights, liberty, and corruption in Serbia.
September 22, 2007... The privatization process in Serbia, which began in the early 1990s, may be characterized as a dismal failure so far. It was originally expected to be completed by the end of 2005; however, at the end of that year an amendment to the...

The long road back: signal noise in the post-Katrina context.(Cover story)
September 22, 2007... On August 29, 2005, the nation watched as Hurricane Katrina pummeled the Gulf Coast, inflicting more than $100 billion of property damage across broad swaths of Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Alabama and ultimately claiming more than 1,600...

Going postal: regulatory reform for the digital age.
September 22, 2007... [The post office] is perhaps the only mercantile project which has been successfully managed by, I believe, every sort of government. --Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations Any mention of...

The German Economy: Europe's faltering giant.(REVIEW ESSAY)
September 22, 2007... In The German Economy beyond the Social Market (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), Horst Siebert provides a profound and detailed analysis of the current state of the German economy. Siebert is in a unique position to carry out...

Reviving the Invisible Hand: The Case for Classical Liberalism in the Twenty-First Century.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Reviving the Invisible Hand: The Case for Classical Liberalism in the Twenty-first Century By Deepak Lal Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. 334. $29.95 cloth. When Adam Smith wrote that individuals acting in their...

On Classical Economics.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... On Classical Economics By Thomas Sowell New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. ix, 304. $35.00 cloth. Thomas Sowell's On Classical Economics is about how little Sowell thinks of classical economics, not a critical restatement of...

Celebrating Irving Fisher: The Legacy of a Great Economist.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Celebrating Irving Fisher: The Legacy of a Great Economist Edited by Robert W. Dimand and John Geanakoplos Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2005. Pp. 456. $39.95 cloth. Few American economists have the reputation Irving Fisher has--he is probably...

Military-economic fascism: how business corrupts government, and vice versa.(Etceteras ...)
September 22, 2007... The business of buying weapons that takes place in the Pentagon is a corrupt business--ethically and morally corrupt from top to bottom. The process is dominated by advocacy, with few, if any, checks and balances. Most people in power like this...