In my previous article, I laid out why war is not good for an economy generally. Yet, while many people admit that the resources used to fight the Vietnam War or either of the U.S. wars on Iraq could have been put to better use, they still have an almost romantic view...
A common theme that has emerged in critiques of my "Wartime Economist" columns on Antiwar.com is that war is good for an economy. One respondent wrote: "Why did [Franklin D.] Roosevelt want the war [World War II] so badly? He wanted it for the same reason every...
About six years ago, I boarded a small United Express airplane in Los Angeles. When I got to my row, a man was sitting in the aisle seat, and I asked him to move so that I could get to the window seat. He scowled at me but grudgingly got up to let me in. While getting...
Author's note: The following is from a talk I gave at a Libertarian Party of California convention in Fresno on Jan. 28. Although it is 90-percent faithful to the talk, I rewrote it to reflect further thoughts I had after the speech. As well as being a research fellow...
At the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., I teach economics to military officers. In general, I love my job and my students. With a median age of about 31, they have much more curiosity than the typical undergrad. That makes sense because, as military...
Nobel laureate in economics Milton Friedman has never, to my knowledge, written on foreign policy. But the framework in one of Friedman's best articles from the early 1950s can be applied directly to foreign policy. As far as I know, no one has done so. This is not...
Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens is right when he denounces former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Although he and I disagree strongly about the wisdom of the U.S. government's war on Iraq – he favors it and I've opposed it from the get-go –...
Sometimes, when I recommend that people read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (the full title is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations), I am met with a supercilious snort, as if nothing that was written in 1776 could be relevant to today. A...
I've been an economist over half my life. The more I've learned, the more I've seen what a powerful insight economist Ludwig von Mises had over 60 years ago when he pointed out that virtually every government intervention leads to unintended consequences that then...
One of the beliefs that most distinguished the fascists, Nazis, and communists of the 20th century was their organic view of society. Proponents of all three ideologies thought of society as an organism – and of each of you, dear readers, as simply a cell in some...
