Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is a farrago of confusions, absurdities, fallacies, and distorted attacks on the free market. The temptation is to engage in almost a line-by-line critique. I will abjure this to first set out some of the basic philosophic and economic flaws, before going into some of the detailed criticisms.
One basic philosophic flaw in [...]

The Road to Civil War
The road to Civil War must be divided into two parts:

the causes of the controversy over slavery leading to secession, and
the immediate causes of the war itself.

The reason for such split is that secession need not have led to Civil War, despite the assumption to the contrary by most historians.
The basic [...]

Ours is truly an Age of Statistics. In a country and an era that worships statistical data as super “scientific,” as offering us the keys to all knowledge, a vast supply of data of all shapes and sizes pours forth upon us. Mostly, it pours forth from government.
While private agencies and trade associations do gather [...]

I.
Once Upon a Time there was a peaceful valley. The people were happy in this valley; they worked, they traded, and they laughed together. No man exerted force upon his neighbor, and all lived and prospered.
One day there came to this valley a roaming band of marauders, led by a gang leader, whom we shall [...]

We have heard a great deal in recent years of the “public sector,” and solemn discussions abound through the land on whether or not the public sector should be increased vis-à-vis the “private sector.” The very terminology is redolent of pure science, and indeed it emerges from the supposedly scientific, if rather grubby, world of “national income [...]

Modern Age is to be warmly congratulated for its articles on “Conservatism and Freedom” in the Fall, 1960 issue. Certainly, there is no more important intellectual task than launching a dialogue toward a synthesis of the two most important intellectual currents on the American “Right” today: the conservative and the libertarian. Modern Age can make, and has begun [...]