The seminar sponsored by IES-Europe, the Cato Institute, and the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung is going well. The students, from all over Europe (and from Africa: Nigeria and Burkina Faso), are really fine. On Saturday this seminar ends and I’m off with Pierre Garello to Leuven in Belgium for the Liberty Seminar, sponsored by the Flemish classical liberal student organisation LVSV, IES-Europe, and the Cato Institute.
I’ve been lecturing here (I gave my talk on the history of limited government this morning), keeping in touch with Cato’s various programs around the world, and doing research for a paper on classical liberal views on poverty and morality for a book commissioned by Cambridge University Press. (Ideas are welcome; I’m digging into various classical liberal views on poverty, groups like the Charity Organization Society, mutual aid and friendly societies, and more, as well as the moral arguments of classical liberal thinkers.)
I might post later on some of the books I’ve read lately, such as Bernard Lewis’s The Crisis of Islam and Christopher Coyne’s After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy, and various books on the histories of welfare states.