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...

Crisis and Leviathan is Higgs' masterwork on how government grows in size, scope, and power in response to real or imagined "crises." From war to economic upheavals, government overreach endures long after each crisis has passed, impinging on civil liberties and fostering extensive corporate welfare.Few topics are as timely as the growth of government. To understand why government has grown, Robert Higgs asserts, one must understand how it has grown. This ...

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. ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

Exploring the politics and morality that pulled the United States into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, this collection of essays, stories, and satirical pieces lambasts the highest officials in the executive branch for incompetence and moral blindness.Immediately after 9/11, government officials and commentators claimed that the terrorist attacks had "changed everything." In contrast, economist and historian Robert Higgs warned that history would likely repeat itself...