Defense costs in the United States have been on the rise for the past several decades. The price index used to measure defense costs has outpaced inflation in the overall economy (as measured by the GDP deflator) by a factor of 1.3 from 1947 to 2020.

As Robert Higgs (1995) explained, revolutionaries “need to understand the nature of the beast they aim to bring down, but they need inspiration, too, because lovers of liberty seek not just to destroy unjustified state power but to build a productive

This definition captures the generic concept of recession, as applied to any variable or parameter, any quantity, aggregate, or magnitude, economic or otherwise. For many years, including the entire memory of almost everyone reading this piece, there

One of the most significant episodes in recent history is the rapid economic growth of East Asian nations in the late twentieth century. Considered alongside Japan and China, the four “tiger economies” of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore

In this issue Bryan Cheang, writing within a lengthy tradition of scholarship, objects to the description of various East Asian success stories, especially Singapore, as exemplars of liberalism. No one within Singapore views Singapore as an especiall

Barton J. Bernstein is a giant on the subject of the atomic bombing of Japan. Any author who receives a lengthy critical reply from this eminent scholar must be honored and nervous at the same time. With all due respect, however, Bernstein’s reply do

We’ll commence with an Old Testament reading, from the “Book of the Prophet Deneen.” As Deneen (2018, xiii) put it: This is simply wrong, though in an interesting way. In fact, classical liberals have been cast out of their traditional kingdom, which

A lthough he is most often regarded as the father of modern economics, Adam Smith’s first work was on moral philosophy. Published in 1759, The Theory of Moral Sentiments centers on the theme of human interaction in society, specifically on what actio

Social scientists have long vied to explain America’s relatively low level of public spending on the welfare state (publicly financed cash and in-kind benefits for citizens) as an aberration from a supposedly high European norm. Many have argued that

Government (public) pensions in the US owned $2.3 trillion in listed equities in 2022.1 The investment rationale for owning equities—the higher expected return arising from the greater uncertainty of equity owners being the residual claimants of comp

Seventy-eight years after the 1945 atomic bombings, Edward Fuller (2023) has offered a new interpretation to contend that the bombing was unnecessary. His is a worthy purpose, and a difficult task. He assembles considerable economic and military data

On August 6, 1945, the government of the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The bomb killed sixty-five thousand Japanese instantly. Another sixty-five thousand inhabitants of Hiroshima perished in the following months. On Augus