Economics

“The Law,” “The State,” and Other Political Writings, 1843–1850, collects nineteen of Bastiat’s “pamphlets,” or articles, ranging from the theory of value and rent, public choice and collective action, government intervention and regulation, the balance of trade, education, and trade unions to price controls, capital and growth, and taxation. Many of these are topics still relevant and debated today. In…

Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, was no dry pedant. His lectures and writings are alive with examples taken from the busy eighteenth-century world around him, and Edmund Burke praised his literary style as “rather painting than writing.” It was Adam Smith who taught moral philosophy and literary criticism to Boswell at the University of Glasgow, and in…

Liberty Fund is pleased to make available in paperback eight of the original thirty-three cloth volumes of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill that were first published by the University of Toronto Press that remain most relevant to liberty and responsibility in the twenty-first century. Born in London in 1806 and educated at the knee of his father, the…

In 1934, Ludwig von Mises left his native Austria in fear of the Nazis, who seized all his papers in 1938 in Vienna and, Mises thought, destroyed them, but the papers were not destroyed. In 1996, Richard and Anna Ebeling discovered the papers in an archive in Moscow. This volume from Liberty Fund represents a treasure trove of important essays.

Bureaucracy provides access to two important and influential books on bureaucracy by Gordon Tullock: The Politics of Bureaucracy (1965) and Economic Hierarchies, Organization and the Structure of Production (1992). When The Politics of Bureaucracy was published in 1965, bureaucracy was viewed by many people as benign—serving the public good with objectivity and omniscience. In Economic Hierarchies, Organization and the Structure…

In the years following its publication, F. A. Hayek’s pioneering work on business cycles was regarded as an important challenge to what later became known as Keynesian macroeconomics. Today, as debates rage on over the monetary origins of the current economic and financial crisis, economists are once again paying heed to Hayek’s thoughts on the repercussions of excessive central bank…