A sweeping celebration of one of the most original and fearless voices in modern political thought.Best known for his landmark work Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, Robert Higgs has repeatedly reshaped how scholars and citizens understand the relationship among government expansion, economic crises, and individual liberty. This carefully curated volume brings together his most influential writings, offering read...

The U. S. Department of Defense is actually one of the world’s largest planned economies. Like all planned economies, it has gross inefficiencies. This book is a penetrating analysis of the military-industrial-Congressional complex, and offers new insights into how meaningful reform can be achieved.Prior to World War II, the United States maintained insignificant military forces and weapons manufacturing industries during peace. But the weapons industry that has gr...

Is Classical Liberalism Still Vital?The quest for freedom has always been as much a battle of ideas as it is a popular struggle. Classical liberal pioneers such as John Locke and Adam Smith stressed the inherent worth of the individual, inalienable rights, and the benevolent consequences of the cooperative, peaceful pursuit of one’s own happiness. These ideas became the intellectual scaffolding for much of the West’s most fundamental institutions and achievements. ...

What is fundamentally wrong with government today? In Against Leviathan, economist and historian Robert Higgs, offers an unflinching critical analysis of government power.Against Leviathan combines an economist’s analytical scrutiny, an historian’s respect for the facts, and a refusal to accept the standard excuses and cruelties of government officialdom. Topics include Social Security, the paternalism of the FDA, the “War on Drugs,” the nature of...

Environmental quality has been a major public concern since the first Earth Day in 1970, yet the maze of environmental laws and regulations enacted since then has fostered huge government bureaucracies better known for waste and failure than for innovation and success.Can we do better than this failed environmental bureaucracy? The noted contributors to this volume answer with a resounding "yes."Re-Thinking Green exposes the myths that have contrib...

Opposing the Crusader State: Alternatives to Global Interventionism, edited by Robert Higgs and Carl Close, examines the history of American noninterventionism and its relevance in today's world.For more than a century U.S. foreign policy—whether conducted by Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives—has been based on the assumption that Americans' interests are served best by intervening abroad to secure open markets for U.S. exports, fight pote...

Other books exist that warn of the dangers of empire and war. However, few, if any, of these books do so from a scholarly, informed economic standpoint. In Depression, War, and Cold War , Robert Higgs, a highly regarded economic historian, makes pointed, fresh economic arguments against war, showing links between government policies and the economy in a clear, accessible way. He boldly questions, for instance, the widely accepted idea that World War II was the chief reason the Dep...

This collection of essays explores the ways in which the defense of liberty can be bolstered by use of a dialectical method—that is, a mode of analysis devoted to grasping the full context of philosophical, cultural, and social factors requisite to the sustenance of human freedom. Its strength lies in the variety of disciplines and perspectives represented by contributors who apply explicitly dialectical tools to a classical liberal / libertarian analysis of social and cultural issues. In ...

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is one of the most powerful of federal regulatory agencies, if not the most powerful. It regulates over 25% of all consumer goods sold in the United States. It makes decisions on a daily basis that affect the lives of millions of people.While the FDA was created to protect the public, how well is it fulfilling this mission and whose interests is it actually protecting?In this book, four outstanding scholars examine how...

Renowned economist and historian Robert Higgs has pioneered a whole new understanding of the causes, means, and effects of government power and the need to deconstruct statism and re-establish institutions that protect and advance liberty, prosperity, and peace.In the course of his work, he has completed seminal work on such issues as health care, the environment, law and economics, urban development, race discrimination, agriculture, immigration, war and peace, ec...

In Delusions of Power, economic historian Robert Higgs calls into question our ingrained notions concerning the nature of the state and democracy. Higgs uproots the foundation stone upon which the state’s powers have rested and grown unchecked by the public.Beginning with the Founding Fathers and moving forward, Higgs reassesses the world wars, the Great Depression and the New Deal, and the financial debacle that began in 2008 with the view of demonstratin...

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety," wrote Benjamin Franklin. Attempting to gain security by sacrificing liberty is also a foolish action because it only increases the potential for harm.In Neither Liberty Nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government, economist and historian Robert Higgs illustrates the false trade-off between freedom and security by showing how ...