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LARGE PRINT EDITION More at LargePrintLiberty.com
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.
LARGE PRINT EDITION More at LargePrintLiberty.com
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.
LARGE PRINT EDITION More at LargePrintLiberty.com
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. "
LARGE PRINT EDITION More at LargePrintLiberty.com
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.
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