Taking a Stand: Reflections on Life, Liberty, and the Economy

by Robert Higgs, Andrew P. Napolitano (Foreword)

In his academic work, Robert Higgs has dissected the government’s shrewd secret excesses that lead to the Welfare State, the Warfare State, and the Administrative State. For several decades he has unstintingly chronicled the federal, state, and local governments’ malfeasance in these many areas of life that all levels of government have intruded upon without Constitutional mandate. In this book, however, are essays that show a whimsical, introspective, and personal side of this world renowned scholar. From the myth that the government has derived its powers from the consent of the governed to the role of independent experts in formulating monetary and fiscal policy; from the government’s duplicity in announcing the unemployment rate in a given month to how the state entraps us, if you want to see a true polymath at work, these lofty, serious, sad, and illuminating essays will educate you beyond what you had thought possible about life, liberty, and the economy.

Genres: Economics, Politics

368 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2015

About the author

Robert Higgs is an American economic historian and economist combining material from Public Choice, the New Institutional economics, and the Austrian school of economics; and a libertarian anarchist in political and legal theory and public policy. His writings in economics and economic history have most often focused on the causes, means, and effects of government power and growth.

Reviews

[Paul Sand · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]

Put into the TBR queue based on some recommendation of which I've lost track. Obtained by UNH's stellar Dimond Library via the Boston Library Consortium from the O'Neill Library at Boston College. Thanks to all involved.

Robert Higgs is an economist (Austrian variety), specializing in economic history. His politics are strict libertarian anarchist. He is associated with the Independent Institute and contributes to their blog, The Beacon. This book organizes 99 blog posts he made over the span of six years. Most are short, each a few minutes reading.

The chapters are organized into six sections. The first, "Politics and the State", demonstrates Higgs' uncompromising contempt for the blood-soaked modern state. He has little patience with even advocates of small government, contending that even the classical-liberal state has no justifiable moral authority.

He's not wrong. But I kept wishing that he had engaged with the argument made in (for example) Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: historically, the rise of the modern state has been accompanied with a drastic decline in violence, coercion, and misery. Accident? Coincidence?

Similarly, Higgs' views on American economic history are depressing: a descent into Leviathan, with no prospect of recovery. (Capitalism is "dead as a dodo since 1914, if not longer.") Here, I wish he'd taken a longer and broader view. Certainly it's theoretically possible for economic liberty to improve; it's done so in the past, and (in some places), it's done so in the recent past. I wish, for example, that Higgs could have explicitly discussed the work of Deirdre McCloskey, another economic historian concerned with how liberty and prosperity evolve.

After the libertarian red meat, Higgs considers (mostly) recent American economic history, especially issues revolving around the recent Great Recession. He is of course critical of government's role in causing and prolonging the crisis. A key thesis is "regime uncertainty": especially in the age of Obama, American government has few restraints guarding against sudden expropriation. How can private entrepreneurs proceed with confidence if the next (inevitable) crisis kicks off a wave of legal plunder?

It would be easy to conclude that Higgs is uniformly dour and cranky. Not true! There's a section of obituaries (including ones for his parents) that show his generous and compassionate side. There are also three economic-themed parodies, based on, respectively, "Monster Mash", "American Pie", and Poe's "The Raven". Funny! (But then I am easily amused.)

As you might expect from a book constructed out of blog posts, things can be both disjointed and a tad repetitive. I found it was best to take things leisurely, reading only a few chapters per sitting.

[Ronald J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting collection of short blog posts by a great libertarian thinker, writer, scholar.