The Cato book forum on the two fascinating new Ayn Rand biographies will be on Book TV on Sunday, November 8.

If you’re in Oregon (or just the Northwest), check out the Freedom Seminar in Portland, November 14, with Larry Reed and Sheldon Richman.

Among the many books I read during my recent travels, I strongly recommend Johan Norberg’s truly excellent diagnosis of (and prescriptions for) the financial crisis: Financial Fiasco: How America’s Infatuation with Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis. It’s far better than the other works I’ve read, not only because Norberg is a smart guy, a meticulous researcher, and a good writer, but because it’s an exercise in economic analysis and financial journalism, with no religion thrown in. (As an example of the latter, the book Meltdown by Thomas Woods insists, contrary to the evidence, that the artificially induced boom resulted in a lengthening of the capital structure through overinvestment in too many “long-term projects.” [p. 68] In fact, what we saw was a bubble in housing, which is not a “long-term project” that will “bear fruit only in the distant future,” but a speculative investment in a durable consumer good, with an additional twist: the low refinancing rates and the inducements to refinance led many to treat their homes as ATM machines and withdraw cash to finance, not “long-term projects,” but consumption. But Mises and Hayek explained a previous boom-and-bust cycle in terms of a lengthening of the capital structure, so we must believe — we must, a priori! — that all boom-and-bust cycles must — they must! — follow the same process. That’s religion, not analysis. Woods embeds some information on the deliberately induced housing bubble and the policies of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc. in a populistic treatment of the crisis; setting aside the religion, it’s ok, but it does not compare well with the much more rigorous and financially sophisticated treatment offered by Norberg.)

Norberg’s book is outstanding. I encourage people to buy it, read it, and recommend it. (I also recommend the writings of John Cochrane of the University of Chicago; this interview of Cochrane by Russell Roberts is a good place to start.)

Lastly….a quick plug for Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice, which contains some essays (e.g., “The Role of Institutions and Law in Economic Development,” “Twenty Myths About Markets,” “Infrastructure: Public or Private”) that may help to make sense of complex economic and political phenomena. At least, John Stossel (then of ABC News) thought so:

“Tom Palmer has the ability to make the complex understandable and to go to the heart of the most difficult problems. He is a valuable resource for journalists and others in search of historical and economic scholarship and philosophical insight, especially about the impact of government intervention and the reasons for respecting the freedom and responsibility of individuals.”

I was quite pleased to find today this review of my book Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice by the distinguished Argentine economist Alberto Benegas-Lynch:

In our time, the open society around the world has come under severe attack including in the United States, going back to at least Franklin Roosevelt’s administration and continuing more recently with the administration of George W. Bush (who relied on state intervention “to save the free market” sic) and that of Barack Obama. Individual rights are being replaced by affirmative action; private property is undermined by socialist ecology; the war on drugs is destroying individual liberties; state education (as opposed to “public education” because private education is also for the public) has turned into indoctrination; public expenditure, federal debt and fiscal deficits are increasing at an exponential rate; compulsory bailouts with other peoples’ resources are paving the way for another crisis; legislation is on its way to intensify socialized medicine; the so-called Social Security program will soon go bankrupt; the monetization of debt and the manipulation of interest rates by the Federal Reserve are destroying the dollar; and there are always new wars to fight in the name of security.

In this climate of affairs nothing could be more timely than the collection of brilliant and provocative papers by Dr. Tom G. Palmer, Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History and Practice, published by the Cato Institute. Civilization means understanding and endorsing certain values and principles, which in turn depends on an open debate of ideas. This collection of essays provides a unique and insightful perspective on classical liberalism. Palmer’s arguments are powerful and combine the abstract with the tangible in unusually well written and thoroughly researched essays. They are a philosophical feast, touching on a board range of topics. It is an honest and outspoken voice. It is entertaining and enlightening. The essays are a sweeping blow to those who advocate collectivism and they reinforce the stand of those of us who believe that a free society is a much better place to live for all persons of good will.

Alberto Benegas-Lynch, Jr.
National Academy of Sciences
Buenos Aires , Argentina

Here’s the review by Alberto Mingardi that appeared in the Italian paper Il Riformista: Il Riformista review of Realizing Freedom Alberto Mingardi
I’ll try to get an English translation up soon. (But I have to rush to finish a hundred things before I fly to China in a bit over a week!)

The inimitable Steven Landsburg has a cool new blog on “The Big Questions,” which goes along with his new book, called, um…The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics.

I attended a book forum at the Cato Institute on The Life and Impact of Ayn Rand that featured the authors of two new biographies of Ayn Rand, Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made and Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, followed by dinner with the authors and a group of very interested people. You don’t have to be an enthusiastic Objectivist to find the ideas and the life of Ayn Rand interesting. The discussion this evening was well worth the time. If you’re interested in libertarianism, or even just twentieth century American intellectual and political history, you should find this interesting. (The video should be up at the link above soon.)

Talking about Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice (available at a deep discount from Amazon.com and at a sliiiightly deeper discount from Laissez Faire Books).

Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice was just reviewed in a major Italian left-of-center daily, Il Riformista: Review of book in Il Riformista. (Another small reason to regret never having learned Italian, dwarfed, of course, by the fact that Italian is among the sexiest and coolest languages in the world.)

I was over to the offices of Reason today for a Reason.TV interview on Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice. I’m not sure when it’ll be up, but I’ll note when it is. (I also did a short interview on Cass Sunstein, who was recently confirmed to office in the Obama Administration, and whose ideas and books I subject to systematic criticism in my book.)

This CD is dynamite. It’s intended to make a remarkable library available to people who may have limited access to books or to the internet, but who have access to a computer. It’s a great project. (Not only because it includes my essay “Twenty Myths About Markets,” also available in Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice.) This is an initiative of the International Policy Network, a group with which I’m proud to work.

I got in from a pretty exhausting set of flights from Odessa to Kyiv to Paris to Washington and am enjoying a long anticipated reunion with my girls Wolly and Tiggy.

The flights gave me the opportunity to get more than half way through Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. (I admit that I also napped a bit and watched a movie.) I had read it before, but never from start to finish like that. It’s a wee bit dry at times, but full of useful insights, not only to understand his theory, but even to become a better person (or at least, to try). In October I’ll be taking part in two conferences in Berlin on “The Adam Smith Problem” (the sometimes alleged incompatibility of The Theory of Moral Sentiments with An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, so I want to be properly prepared, and reading the whole book from the first to the last page seemed a good start. (I will be a bit more selective with An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and may skip the digression on silver, for example.)

It’s been great spending time with advocates for liberty from across Europe (including Turkey) here in Marseille at the European Resource Bank. I’ve learned a good deal about new means of reaching the public and will speak this afternoon on some traditional means, such as the basics of writing a press release. This evening I’ll present my book Realizing Freedom at a dinner talk along with Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic.*

*On the back of the book, you’ll find Klaus’s statement about it: “Tom Palmer has been long involved in fighting the battle of ideas; in confronting collectivism, extensive government intervention, and the suppression of human freedom and economic prosperity. This book should be read by all who care about freedom. It is important to remind each generation that freedom can never be taken for granted. Collectivist, anti-libertarian ideologies did not cease to exist at the moment the Iron Curtain fell.”

Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice is now available as a Kindle book, as well.

I was contacted by several people about the death of G. A. Cohen, to whose ideas I devoted a chapter of my book Realizing Freedom. (The chapter, originally published in Critical Review, is also available in a PDF form here.)

I’ll just make two points about Cohen here, as I believe it generally best (there are exceptions) not to speak ill of the dead. In a meeting in his office when he reviewed an early draft of the essay above, he admitted that I had found a serious flaw, but demanded to know (and demanded is the right word) what my point was: “Are you attacking the argument, or the conclusion?!” I said I did not understand the question. He answered, “Well, the conclusion does not follow from the argument, so which are you attacking?” I was rather flabbergasted, and replied that the conclusion of an argument is a part of the argument, not some separate thing. But that was not how he saw things, and it showed in his entire career. There are arguments, and there are conclusions. You attach yourself to a conclusion, and then you look for arguments that lead to it. That’s why he was an “analytical Marxist,” i.e., someone who agreed with what he took to be Marx’s conclusions, but who thought that the arguments by which Marx reached them were erroneous or fallacious, so his job was to come up with new arguments. If those didn’t work, you kept the conclusion and looked for other arguments. (In this case, however, despite acknowledging to me that his argument failed to reach the conclusion, he never acknowledged it publicly, but took some pains to lobby journals not to publish my critique, as was confided to me by editors of those journals.)

To get a sense of what kind of man he was, think a bit on this defense of the Soviet Union:

The Soviet Union needed to be there as a defective model so that, with one eye on it, we could construct a better one. It created a non-capitalist mental space in which to think about socialism.*

Millions had to die so that Cohen and his rich friends could enjoy “a non-capitalist mental space in which to think about socialism.” Words almost fail me. But not entirely. He should have spent his life begging forgiveness from all of the people who suffered from his pro-Soviet (he spent a good bit of his youth as a Soviet propagandist, which was essentially a family enterprise) and pro-Communist activities. He was no different than any old National Socialist who might have regretted that National Socialism wasn’t nationally socialist enough, but who enjoyed the “mental space” it created to construct fantasies of an ideal life.

I will merely point out that his attacks on charity and assistance to others is consistent, not only with his political philosophy, but with his personality and life.

*From p. 250 of his 1995 book Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), in which he strings together the “argument” that does not lead to the “conclusion” that property rights are unjustified.

Also posted at Cato@Liberty and the AtlasNetwork.

My friends David Beito and Linda Royster Beito have published an important new book, Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power (University of Illinois Press, 2009).

It was just reviewed in the Wall Street Journal: “Demanding Rights, Courting Controversy
A flamboyant civil-rights leader —doctor, orator, activist—finally gets his due,” by Mark Bauerlein. After noting that Howard has received much too little attention in the histories of the civil rights movement (”A flamboyant Second Amendment, ­anti-communist capitalist doesn’t please journalists and historians searching for civil-rights martyrs.”), Bauerlein notes,

“Black Maverick” … makes room for exactly such a figure, and rightly so. That Howard made an important contribution is unquestionable. Three months after the Till murder, he lectured in a ­Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., the guest of ­26-year-old pastor Martin Luther King. He spoke of shootings, the FBI and a ­freedom march on ­Washington, D.C. One woman in the audience remembered years later Howard’s vivid ­description of the Till killing. Her name was Rosa Parks, and four days after Howard spoke she answered a Montgomery bus driver, “No.”

Jason Talley interviewed me recently for his MotorHomeDiaries.com project. It was fun! (I was wearing a bit of Tracht that day.)

John Stuart Mill’s influential book On Liberty is 150 years old this year. Despite my reservations about the arguments Mill advances, Happy Birthday!!

Andrew Norton, an old friend from Australia, has a very elegant appreciation in the magazine Policy from the Centre for Independent Studies: “On Liberty at 150.”

As Andrew insightfully notes,

Classical liberalism is less rationalistic and individualistic, but more pluralistic, than Mill’s liberalism. Classical liberals support the freedom to conduct ‘experiments in living,’ as they support entrepreneurship in business. Innovation is necessary to progress but error-prone; only some social and commercial experiments will prove themselves to be better than the status quo. So classical liberals take a more benign view than Mill of custom and established social practices, which offer template ‘plans of life.’ People’s lives are not second-rate just because they are derivative rather than original. Nor should civil society be attacked by the state for not supporting individuality, as modern left-liberals do in using anti-discrimination law to enforce Millian ideals of personal autonomy on conservative religious institutions. There are diverse ways of living a good life, and governments should not try to reduce their number.

I am in general agreement with Andrew’s take, although I do not blame Mill as much for the decline of classical liberalism (that’s a complex subject for another occasion).

I also would add that I find the book that inspired On Liberty, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s On the Limits of State Action, is in many ways a more interesting book, but mainly influential through its influence on such thinkers as Mill.

You can find On Liberty online here.

I find myself sometimes bored on airplane flights and unable to write any more reports or read any more serious books. So, I admit it, I sometimes spend time on just fun fiction. I recently read The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks on a long flight. It was fun and I recommend it to people who enjoy science fiction writing. (The surprise wasn’t a big surprise at all, but it was rewarding, nonetheless.)

But I do try to keep up with my history, philosophy, and political economy, too. (I recently got several histories of India, and will try to work through those, as well as some more works on jurisprudence and legal and political theory.)

My book Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice will soon be available in a Kindle edition and can be pre-ordered now. (Note: I love my new Kindle DX.) Amazon.com has also put up a searchable “Look inside this book” option for Realizing Freedom.

I will be personally autographing copies of Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice at Freedom Fest and at several events in Europe in the near future. It’s available on Amazon and from Laissez Faire Books (LFB will be selling copies at Freedom Fest) I’m told that Amazon should have the “Search Inside” feature soon, as well as a Kindle edition.

On the road I’ve re-read Carl Schmitt’s most interesting challenge to liberalism, The Concept of the Political, which will be discussed at a conference I’m organizing in France later this summer. It’s a maddeningly strange book at times, but presents one of the best full-frontal assaults on liberalism (well, on civilization, in my opinion) I’ve ever read. (To get the full sense of what Schmitt is about, I also recommend reading Ernst Jünger’s In the Storm of Steel, which presents a gritty glorification of militarism and “the Ideals of 1914.”)

Another very interesting book, which I read in preparation for my talk in New Delhi on “Enduring Democracy and Limited Government,” is Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s insightful, daring, and highly intelligent The Burden of Democracy, which offers an economically, sociologically, and psychologically rich discussion of liberal democracy, with special attention to the context and history of India. Mehta’s short and very readable book (I warn that you will have to ask Mr. Google or Mr. Yahoo for help with some of the Indian political references) reminds me of the better sociologically-oriented essays of Joseph Schumpeter.