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This remarkable book is the most comprehensive, sweeping, compelling, and unsettling case ever penned against what is laughingly called the criminal-justice system. It is a classic, devastating at its core, that is made newly available to speak to us in our times in which the state is completely out of control. Clarence Darrow is best known today as the Chicago lawyer who defended John T. Scopes in the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. But that case actually played a minor role in his life. He was an attorney by training who, from experience, learned that the entire state apparatus of courts, trials, and prisons was the worst single feature of the state. He saw the entire machinery as a gigantic fraud, a purveyor of injustice, a producer of criminality itself. How so? Because, in the same way that the state cannot plan the economy, "the state furnishes no machinery for arriving at justice." He proves the point. It taxes people more rather than brings about compensation. It kills rather than rights wrongs. It ruins lives instead of righting them. It cares nothing about victims and instead makes more of them. Darrow even argues that the state attempts to create more criminals rather than stopping crime. For this reason, and after seeing these truths play themselves out in his work, he became a radical, and Resist Not Evil is his manifesto. What strikes you as you read is that certain negative points about "criminal justice" that you have noticed are not just periodic accidents. They aren't mistakes. They aren't exceptions. Darrow explains that the injustice of the system is intrinsic to the system itself. Far from being the proper agency to adjudicate and administer justice, the state is actually the worst agency for this purpose.

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Housing, a central priority for government policy for many decades, collapsed in 2008; even in 2011, millions of homes are under water. This poses many economic and ethical issues. This elegant and fact-filled book by former Mises Institute president Doug French examines the background to the case of "strategic default," or walking away from your home, and considers its implications from a variety of different perspectives. The thesis here is that there is nothing ominous or evil about this practice. It is an extension of economic rationality.

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Written in the same year that he testified before the Currency Commission in Austria-Hungary, and published in English in 1892, Carl Menger explains that it is not government edicts that create money but instead the marketplace. Individuals decide what the most marketable good is for use as a medium of exchange. "Man himself is the beginning and the end of every economy," Menger wrote, and so it is with deciding what is to be traded as money. "Money has not been generated by law. In its origin it is a social, and not a state institution. Sanction by the authority of the state is a notion alien to it. "

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The Housing Bubble was hardly the first in human history. What's eluded historians is the same issue that eludes commentators today: the underlying cause of bubbles. This book is the first (and only) book to solve the mystery of the most famous bubble in world history: Tulipmania in 17th century Netherlands. It Is a legendary event but explanations have been lacking. People blame irrational exuberance, free markets, and an unleashed aristocracy. Douglas French takes a different route: he follows the money to prove that the bubble resulted from a government intervention that dramatically exploded the money supply and fueled the tulip-price bubble - not altogether different from modern bubbles. This book was French's Master's thesis written under the direction of Murray Rothbard and examining three of the most famous speculative bubble episodes in history through the lens of Austrian Business Cycle Theory. Although each of these episodes is well documented, this book examines the monetary interventions that engendered each of these events showing that not only the Mississippi Bubble and the South Sea Bubble were caused by government meddling, but Tulipmania was as well. Tulipmania was unique in that it was the sound money policy of the Dutch combined with free coinage laws that led to an acute increase in the supply of money and fostered an atmosphere that was ripe for speculation and malinvestment, manifesting itself in the intense trading of tulip bulbs. The author examines not only the Mississippi Bubble but also the life and monetary theories of its architect, John Law. Professor Joe Salerno calls Law the world's first macroeconomist who implemented a Keynesian monetary system in France nearly two hundred years before Keynes was born. At the same time across the English Channel, a nearly bankrupt British government looked on with envy at Law's system, believing that he was working a financial miracle. It was anything but this and investors in both countries were devastated. Although these episodes occurred centuries ago, readers will find the events eerily similar to today's bubbles and busts: low interest rates, easy credit terms, widespread public participation, bankrupt governments, price inflation, frantic attempts by government to keep the booms going, and government bailouts of companies after the crash. When will we learn? We first have to get cause and effect in history straight. This book is an excellent contribution to that effort.