For thousands of years, philosophers have told us that if we are to live our lives at their best, we should seek truth, beauty, and goodness. Of course, each of these qualities has raised thorny issues and provoked ongoing arguments. That people have carried on such arguments, rather than surrendering themselves to their raw appetites and animal instincts, may be counted a valuable thing in itself. A final resolution of such deep questions may lie beyond human capacities.

Most important, perhaps, mom set a good example: she was a hard worker in her own daily life. Because the town in which she grew up had no high school and her father would not allow her to leave home to continue her education, she had no schooling beyond the eighth grade. When she was sixteen years old, she married my father (who was eight years older), and during the forty-four years of their marriage (ended by his death in 1977), she kept house as if being a good wife and mother constituted a vital and worthy occupation.

Even if she had other things to do, she prepared three full meals (each almost always from scratch) every day. Meal preparation might be a fully integrated production process, starting with killing a chicken, then plucking and gutting it, and cutting it into pieces for frying. I sometimes brought home fish or crawfish I had caught or a cottontail rabbit I had shot, and, with my help in cleaning, shelling, or skinning, as the raw material required, she cooked them for supper. (I also raised rabbits for our table.) After each meal, she washed and dried the dishes (though after supper my dad often dried) and swept the kitchen. She cleaned the entire house daily, keeping it neat and spotless even though we lived in a dusty rural area during most of the years when I was growing up. Monday was laundry day for her, which meant that she labored in the garage with her old-fashioned wringer washer, hanging the damp clothing and other items on the clothesline to dry, and later gathering and carefully folding them and, for items such as shirts, sheets and pillow cases, ironing them before putting everything away in its proper drawer.

Cooking, cleaning, and washing, however, hardly composed the whole of her work. As a young woman, she had “felt the call” to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and by the time I was four or five years old, she had become the pastor of a backwoods Pentecostal church somewhere beyond McAlester, Oklahoma, the town near which we lived at the time. Later, after we moved to California in 1951, she was again a pastor at several different churches in succession. This ministry demanded a great deal of work from her, for preparing sermons, conducting services several times each week (sometimes every night, when a “revival meeting” was going on), and attending to the spiritual and personal needs of her congregation in times of sickness, bereavement, and other troubles. Her natural compassion and sincere sympathy, as well as her religious faith, served her well in this calling.

Although being a full-time housewife, mother, and pastor might have been enough, or even too much, for most women, she found time for a great deal of additional activity―her secret was that no matter what task she tackled, she worked very fast. She crocheted and embroidered decorative items, especially doilies and pillowcases, for our home. Once each week, for several hours, she met with other ladies at the church to make quilts in a team effort to help support the church. (I still have some of these beautiful works of folk art.) She tended a large vegetable garden in the spring and summer, as well as her beloved roses and other flowers. At certain times of the year, she went out to the cotton fields, which in those days still required a great deal of hand labor, to work with gangs of laborers in “chopping” (weeding) and “picking” (harvesting) cotton.

Because as a young boy I went everywhere she went―I can’t recall ever having a babysitter, as such, although I sometimes spent time at a neighbor’s house with my friends―I accompanied her in her work outside the house. The earliest such experience had to do with picking cotton, when I was perhaps four or five years old. I was too little to have my own sack, so I would go ahead of her in the row, plucking out the fluffy lint and building up a little pile in the row. When she had picked her way up to my pile, she would deposit it in her sack, and I would move farther ahead of her to repeat the process, again and again. I loved this work. Besides enjoying the picking itself, in good-natured company with a group of other pickers, I had a fine time tossing unopened bolls at other kids, who naturally tossed bolls back at me. By the time I was six years old, I had persuaded mom to make me a sack of my own, which she did by using a potato sack, attaching a strap that I could place over one shoulder, in the standard manner for cotton pickers. When my little sack was stuffed full, I would take it to the scales, have it weighed, collect my per-pound payment, dump the contents of my sack into the trailer (sometimes adding a swan dive into the cotton if it had piled up high in the trailer), and return to the field to fill it again. As I got older, my sacks got bigger. By the time I was ten or eleven years old, I had graduated to the standard 12-foot sack the adults used, and I was able to pick as much as 200 pounds or so in a day. By the late 1950s, however, picking machines had displaced hand pickers almost completely in our area of California, so my cotton picking with mom ended when I was about twelve or thirteen years old.

Mom also took me on a variety of ad hoc work outings. In the late summer, we would visit peach and apricot orchards at which the commercial harvesting had ended, notwithstanding that a great deal of fruit remained here and there on the trees. It was going to rot unless someone took the trouble to collect it, so the owners allowed anyone and everyone to come into the orchards to pick it without charge. We would bring home big boxes filled with fruit, which my mom would can for our consumption during the following year. We would also go along the banks of the San Joaquin River where wild blackberries grew profusely and pick great quantities of them. Again, the haul would be canned and―best of all―made into my mom’s mouth-watering blackberry cobbler. Also along the river, in season, we found and picked wild mustard greens, a delicacy in my mom’s taste, though intolerable in mine.

Mom taught me to drive a car. When I was ten years old, I began to drive on the country roads, and when I was fifteen, she took me to get a driver’s license (six months before I had reached my sixteenth birthday, which in those days was permitted because I had taken a driver’s education course in school). She cringed but did not prevent me from getting my first shotgun at age ten. With my little .410 single-shot gun and an endless expanse of game-rich fields, sloughs, and marshes as my hunting ground, I became a great hunter, in my own mind, at least. (I confess that I was considerably more careful with the gun than I was with the car, and the end result tested my dad’s patience on more than one occasion.) Mom taught me how to dress, how to “behave,” how to write a check, and how to carry out a thousand other tasks an adult must master. I learned how to cook by watching her and helping with simple jobs in the kitchen, such as cleaning fish and grinding cabbage with the hand-cranked grinder to make coleslaw. Sometimes I helped with the dishwashing after supper.

Starting when I was fourteen, during school vacations in the summer, I worked full-time in regular jobs, alongside the men, first on the ranch where we lived and later at a local box factory. My parents did not demand or even suggest such employment―”you’ll have plenty of time to work later,” they said―but I had learned from their examples to value earning my own way. So, from my sophomore year in high school onward, I did not need to take any money from them, although I continued to receive my room and board from them, as always.

When I was a kid, mom allowed me to roam far and wide across the countryside, and my boyhood was occupied not only with attending school and playing on school sports teams―and with working, as I’ve described―but also with exploring, fishing, hunting, and swimming in the canals. In the evening, when supper was ready, I was often still outside somewhere, and my mom’s voice would ring out across the darkening fields to call me in, “Bobby Laaaaaaareeee.” In my memory, I hear it still as clearly as I heard it then.

Any boy would be fortunate, as I most certainly was, to have such a mother: loving, kind, gentle, compassionate, good-humored, hardworking, dedicated to her family and loyal to her friends, at home in her world, and at peace with her place in it.

Ledbetter recognizes the MIC’s fuzzy meaning, but for purposes of his analysis he supposes that “we can approximately define MIC as a network of public and private forces that combine a profit motive with the planning and implementation of strategic policy” (p. 6). For virtually all scholars, it comprises the armed forces and the civilian military leadership, the relevant committees and leadership of Congress, and the private contractors who supply goods and services to the military. Many analysts also include lesser players, such as the leading universities, certain scientists and think tanks, veterans’ groups, certain labor unions, and local politicians whose jurisdictions include military bases or contractors’ facilities.

Although the MIC obviously has powerful and widespread supporters, it has always attracted critics, who indict it on several counts, including wasteful military spending, diversion of government spending from social programs, economic distortions, enlargement of military influence in American society, promotion of a culture of state secrecy, and suppression of individual liberties. Rather than extensively evaluating these criticisms, Ledbetter focuses on the changing idea of the MIC, assessing contemporary arguments about it in the light of criteria suggested in Eisenhower’s speech.

He finds antecedents in several notions advanced previously, including the merchants-of-death thesis, the war-economy thesis, the garrison-state thesis, and the technocratic-elite thesis. These theses retain some pertinence within the MIC thesis.

Ledbetter traces Eisenhower’s concern about military-economic relations back at least to 1930-31, when Ike participated in Army planning for industrial mobilization. Having studied industrial agreements, possible takeovers, and price controls, he was uneasy about such military involvement in the economy. Ledbetter concludes that the “importance of keeping a peacetime separation between business and the military would stay with him for the rest of his life” (p. 51). As president, Eisenhower continued to emphasize “the need for restrained military spending to preserve American economic liberty” (p. 61).

Soon after becoming president, Eisenhower gave his second-most-memorable speech, the “Chance for Peace” address, on April 16, 1953. Stalin had just died, and the president sought to move the United States toward a less menacing relationship with the USSR by proposing measures to promote greater cooperation and trust between the Cold War adversaries. He highlighted the great opportunity costs of ongoing large-scale military preparedness. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed” (p. 68). Although the “Chance for Peace” initiative bore no fruit and the Cold War assumed even more menacing dimensions after 1953, Eisenhower’s concern about its costly distortion of the U.S. economy clearly prefigured the concerns he expressed in his farewell address almost eight years later.

Ledbetter’s attempts to tie down exactly who coined the term “military-industrial complex” proved unsuccessful. Eisenhower’s chief speechwriter, Malcomb Moos, has often been credited, but even though he seemed to have been happy to let people think he had come up with the term, he never bluntly claimed to have done so. Ledbetter’s examination of successive drafts of the speech revealed no unambiguous evidence of who introduced it.

In any event, the term resonated with diverse political groups in the 1960s, including New Leftists inspired by C. Wright Mills’s analysis of the power elite, critics of wasteful military spending, such as Senator William Proxmire, and various antiwar groups. Eventually, the idea of the MIC merged into references to the “warfare state” and the “national security state.”

Over the years, many congressional investigations and other studies have been undertaken of Pentagon contracting and other aspects of military-economic relations in the United States. Serious problems―cost overruns, late deliveries, official and corporate corruption, crony-capitalist bailouts, de facto industrial policy-making, and many others―have been documented again and again. Despite repeated attempts ostensibly to root out these misfeasances and malfeasances, nothing fundamental ever changes in the MIC’s operation. Even now, more than twenty years after the USSR imploded and the Cold War ended, the United States spends more than ever on the military and does so as wastefully and nonchalantly as it did before, with no serious repercussions. Despite a long-standing statutory requirement that the Defense Department be audited annually, it never has been, and cannot be, owing to the sorry state of its financial records.

Ledbetter astutely concludes that “it is difficult to see how the United States would be sufficiently motivated to eliminate the MIC, let alone replace it with something superior. . . . [I]t is nearly impervious to democratic reform” (pp. 202-03). As he notes, the root problem is not so much the wretched performance of contractors and the self-interested actions of implicated parties in Congress and the military as it is the stupendously wide scope of U.S. geopolitical ambitions. As long as the U.S. government continues to perceive a “vital” interest in nearly every place and nearly every dispute in the wide world, any hope of realizing Eisenhower’s dream of cutting the MIC down to size and moving toward genuine disarmament and peace is doomed to disappointment.

[Acknowledgment: This review will appear in the Journal of Cold War Studies, published by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.]

The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated.

The worst is atomic war.

The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

As James Ledbetter writes in his recently published book Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex (Yale University Press, 2011), “Never before, and rarely afterward, did a U.S. president so passionately and prominently lay out a vision for ending tensions with the Soviet Union or so frankly criticize the social costs of military spending” (p. 69).

We know, of course, that this peace initiative was stillborn. The Soviets did not bite, and the U.S. government did little or nothing to pursue the matter, opting instead to build an ever more imposing and frightful national insecurity state. We may all rejoice that the more horrible of the two possible consequences of this course of action, atomic war, did not occur (especially when we consider how narrowly such war was averted on several occasions).

Yet, if the world escaped the apocalypse of atomic war, it did not and could not avoid the costs of waging the Cold War and its successor, the War on Terrorism. Nor have these costs been merely sacrifices of food, clothing, homes, highways, schools, and hospitals, as Eisenhower illustrated in his speech. In a deeper sense, the costs have taken the form of lost confidence in humanity and its future, of lost hope for a world of secure peace and true prosperity.

Eisenhower declared that his proposals “conform to our firm faith that God created men to enjoy, not destroy, the fruits of the earth and of their own toil. They aspire to this: the lifting, from the backs and from the hearts of men, of their burden of arms and of fears, so that they may find before them a golden age of freedom and of peace.” If only that fleeting chance for peace had been seized before it disappeared into the abyss of hatred, fear, and waste.

Bernanke and his supporting cast of monetary economists can also point to corroborating evidence that by historical standards the rate of inflation has been modest. The year-to-year change (ending in January 2011) in the all-items consumer price index (CPI) was only 1.7 percent; the two-year change, only 4.3 percent. The implicit price deflator for GDP, the broadest of all price indexes, reveals even less inflation. This index, which is computed on a quarterly basis, shows a one-year change of only 1.4 percent for the year ending in the fourth quarter of 2010, and a corresponding two-year change of only 1.8 percent.

(I have computed all of the figures mentioned in this article from basic data available at the website maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.)

The foregoing variables are the ones that macroeconomists and monetary analysts at the Fed consult most often in their analysis of the economy’s performance and of the relation between money and inflation. So, if Bernanke tells us that inflation is not a problem, he is clearly resting his case on the kinds of evidence that the country’s recognized experts in the great universities view as scientifically de rigueur.

A serious problem lurks, however, in the way the mainstream experts think about the economy, and hence in the kind of analysis they undertake to assess its current performance and its likely future changes. All too often, they model the macroeconomy as a black box into which flow undifferentiated “labor” services and “capital” services and out of which flows a uniform substance called “output,” measured empirically by estimates of real GDP. Units of this output command a price known as the “price level,” measured empirically by the GDP deflator; otherwise, prices play no role in the model. The interest rate plays only a limited role as a determinant of the demand for money and as a minor determinant of saving and investment spending. Time is essentially irrelevant. There is no time structure of production in which certain kinds of production must precede others in a process running from raw materials to intermediate goods to completed consumer goods because, as mentioned, such distinctions among different kinds of goods are ignored in favor of positing a single homogeneous “output.” Just as time plays no role, and hence the interest rate (the price of goods available now relative to goods available later) plays no role in resource allocation, so location does not matter. It’s as though all production took place at a Euclidian point, and therefore no one need worry about, say, the government’s injecting “stimulus” money into Connecticut in order to lower unemployment in Nevada.

Although modern macroeconomic models, which have been constructed since the 1930s, vary in many ways, and some of them do not conform to the foregoing description in one way or another, the general approach of macroeconomic analysis fits my description all too well. It is a mode in analysis in which the time structure of production is ignored, interest rates play little or no role in allocating resources between time periods, a single output is produced, and inputs are viewed as homogeneous in kind, quality, and location. If one suspects that such extreme simplification may be squeezing every feature of the Prince of Denmark out of Hamlet, one’s instincts are alive and well.

Because this approach to thinking about the macroeconomy is essentially timeless―inputs flow in and outputs flow out simultaneously during any arbitrarily defined period of time―the Fed’s scrutiny of the economy’s performance tends to be extraordinarily focused on the recent past (from which its most up-to-date data come) and the near-term future. Truly long-run considerations scarcely come into play, as the Fed attempts to fine tune its policy instruments at monthly or more frequent intervals to keep the economy on a smooth growth path with a low rate of inflation and a low rate of unemployment―in truth, an impossible task even if performed with the greatest competence, because the number of targets exceeds the number of instruments. So, Bernanke is always referring to the most recent report on inflation, for example, to demonstrate that the Fed has taken the optimal policy stance; and he always assures us that whenever new data reveal a deviation from the desired economic conditions, the Fed will take appropriate steps to correct its misbehavior.

Such myopic monetary policy making has great potential for creating too much monetary stimulus in certain periods, then overreacting by creating too much monetary contraction, thereby introducing or amplifying fluctuations in the economy’s real growth or its rate of inflation that would not occur if the Fed did not exist. As Roger Garrison observes, the Fed is a loose cannon on the economy’s deck, rolling with great momentum here and there as the ship pitches and rolls and wreaking havoc as it crashes into everything in its compass. Bernanke claims to have absorbed Milton Friedman’s teachings about the Fed’s responsibility for causing the Great Depression, but he evidently skipped Friedman’s class on the day that the professor told the pupils that monetary policy exerts its effects with long and variable lags. Because of these unpredictable lags, the Fed is always, as it were, reacting to information that does not tell the full story about how the economy is already responding, or eventually will respond, to monetary policy changes that extend for a year or more into the past.

One error the Fed makes time and again is failure to recognize until it is too late that it has already built inflation into the system. So, we might well wonder whether the Fed is making that very error now. Several indicators suggest strongly that it is doing so.

Inflation does not usually appear equally throughout the economy. Instead, it usually begins in the markets for raw materials and intermediate goods and then works its way to consumer-goods markets, where retailers always explain to irate buyers that they are raising prices only because their cost of goods has risen. If such inflation is occurring now, we can identify it by checking the producer price index (PPI) and some of its components.

Looking first at the overall PPI, we find that the year-to-year change (ending in January 2011) was 5.7 percent, or 4 percentage points greater than the change in the CPI; the two-year change was 12.3 percent, or 8 percentage points greater than the change in the CPI.

Some important components of the PPI have risen even faster. For the PPI for crude foodstuffs and feedstuffs, the one-year change was 20.6 percent, the two-year change, 25.6 percent. The PPI for fuels and power shows a one-year change of 6.5 percent and a two-year change of 33.1 percent. Because food, feed, fuel, and power are so critical to many of the world’s poorer countries, these rapid increases in prices have already provoked riots and other displays of desperation throughout the world. It is reasonable to assume that before long the price increases in these markets will have an effect on the rate of increase in consumer-goods prices in the United States and other advanced economies.

We may also look for price changes that reflect market participants’ expectation of future inflation and hence their attempts to purchase real goods that might serve them as hedges against such price acceleration. Here the most notable indicators include, of course, the price of gold. For the closing gold price in January 2011, the one-year increase was 24.0 percent, the two-year increase, 44.3 percent. Other such indicators come from the stock market, where traders bid up share prices in the expectation of future net income to be earned from the firms’ sales of real goods and services. For the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, the one year increase (ending in January 2011) was 19.8 percent, the two-year increase, 55.7 percent.

Bernanke dismisses evidence such as the foregoing by noting, correctly, that the prices of producer goods typically vary more than the prices of consumer goods. In his view, one only muddies the waters of one’s analysis of inflation by taking note of producer prices. He might similarly dismiss the zooming prices of gold and corporate stocks as the product of forces unrelated to monetary policy―which they might be, of course, but in the present case I do not think they are.

Bernanke is a celebrated mainstream macroeconomist. His achievements in this field account for his having become Fed chairman in the first place. But this background, training, and research have predisposed him, as it has predisposed almost all mainstream macro and monetary economists, to think about the macroeconomy and about the relation between money and inflation in a way that hides essential elements of what is actually occurring. The root of all of these evils is excessive aggregation. The reigning macroeconomic analysis also has other important flaws, as I have suggested, but however these other problems might be dealt with, as long as mainstream analysts continue to work within the confines of such highly aggregated models, continued failures to understand and control the economy’s movements are well-nigh inevitable.

With that essential idea in mind, let us examine what has happened recently to private domestic business net investment, which I will henceforth call simply net private investment. Such investment reached its recent cyclical peak in the third quarter of 2007, at $463 billion (annual rate). It then fell steadily for the next four quarters, reaching $336 billion in the third quarter of 2008. At that point, it plunged steeply, falling to only $159 billion, or by 53 percent, in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Although the financial-market panic that had flared up in late September 2008 began to subside early in 2009, net private investment continued to fall, becoming negative (-$53 billion, annual rate) in the first quarter of 2009 and even more negative in the second quarter (-$119 billion). Although some improvement began in the third quarter of 2009, net private investment remained negative during the third and fourth quarters. For the entire year 2009, the amount of net private investment amounted to a large negative amount (-$69 billion). So, in other words, the value of the private business capital stock fell by that amount. Hardly by coincidence, real GDP also fell substantially in 2009, by 2.6 percent.

In 2010, net private investment increased smartly for three quarters, reaching an annual rate of $270 billion in the third quarter, then contracted sharply – by almost 47 percent – to $144 billion in the fourth quarter. For the entire year, the amount of private net investment was $177 billion. Whether the collapse in the final quarter of 2010 will turn out to have been a fluke or the beginning of a longer-term decline, we shall have to wait to see.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the most recent business-cycle peak occurred in December 2007, and the trough was reached in June 2009. As we have seen, net private investment peaked slightly sooner, in the third quarter of 2007. So, we are now more than three years past the economy’s overall peak and some 20 months past its trough, yet net private investment in the most recent quarter was running at only 31 percent of the annual rate at its previous peak.

Private net investment is currently running far below the rate required to sustain a rapid rate of economic growth. Real consumer spending, in contrast, peaked in the fourth quarter of 2007, fell only slightly (about 2.5 percent) to the second quarter of 2009, and by the fourth quarter of 2010 exceeded its previous quarterly peak (by almost 1 percent). Despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth among Keynesian economists and politicians with regard to allegedly inadequate consumption, a collapse of consumption is not to blame for the economy’s anemic recovery to date. However, looking elsewhere for the cause, we find that the economy’s true engine of growth – private business net investment – continues to sputter, running in the most recent quarter at less than a third of its previous peak rate and, for the entire year 2010, at only 40 percent of its rate for the entire year 2007.

Unless net private investment recovers more rapidly, the overall economy’s recovery is sure to remain slow, at best, certainly too slow to bring down significantly the high unemployment rate that has been stuck for a long time between 9 percent and 10 percent (and would be substantially greater if we took into account the millions who have left the labor force recently because they did not believe they could find a job even if they searched for one). As matters now stand, real stagnation is a likely prospect and, given the Fed’s massive ongoing purchases of Treasury debt and the stupendous amount of excess reserves in the commercial banks’ accounts at the Fed, stagflation also seems to be a credible expectation.

Investors continue to view the future with major misgivings, owing to the unsettled condition of the government’s future actions with regard to health care, financial regulations, energy regulations, taxation, and other matters that have serious implications for business costs and the security of private property rights in business capital and its returns. Although ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank bill have already been enacted, these massive statutes leave scores of important details awaiting determination by administrative agencies and courts whose actions will be fiercely contested at every step. Future tax rates also remain up for grabs in Congress.

Nor are the investment-paralyzing uncertainties confined to the United States. Europe in particular continues to wrestle with the aftermath of the malinvestments and other distortions wrought in its asset markets and financial institutions during the boom of 2002-2006, and several countries teeter on the brink of sovereign default. Given the close linkages of national markets in today’s world, U.S. companies will feel a great impact from any new crises in Europe – something else to worry about as they contemplate the desirability of increasing their investment spending.

Of course, the major trading countries and their governments may ultimately find a way to muddle through. They have eventually weathered major storms in the past. Yet, however the world’s economy moves in the longer term, the immediate prospect for investors in the U.S. economy remains troubled, at best. A substantial, rapid recovery of private business net investment must await the clearing of these clouds. Until such a recovery does occur, however, overall economic prospects must remain rather gloomy for the near and medium terms.

I cannot give Glaeser a third cheer, however, because toward the end of the article he inserts a concession that I find wholly inconsistent with the rest of the argument. He writes:

Economists’ fondness for freedom rarely implies any particular policy program. A fondness for freedom is perfectly compatible with favoring redistribution, which can be seen as increasing one person’s choices at the expense of the choices of another, or with Keynesianism and its emphasis on anticyclical public spending.

Many regulations can even be seen as force for freedom, like financial rules that help give all investors the freedom to invest in stocks by trying to level the playing field.

To be sure, many mainstream economists do think about policy just as Glaeser says they do. But in doing so, they are mistaken. I find it difficult to believe that a man of Glaeser’s intelligence has really given much thought to what he is saying in these passages.

In fact, a presumption in favor of freedom rules out virtually everything that modern governments do, certainly nearly everything they do in interfering in economic affairs. Redistribution of income, for example, requires that the government rob Peter in order to benefit Paul (and its own functionaries, who serve as middlemen in this transfer). This action is not freedom; it is a crime against Peter, a raw violation of his right to his own legitimate property. Keynesian countercyclical spending requires the government to spend borrowed money whose acquisition is premised on future taxation (that is, robbery) of taxpayers in order to service the debt and repay the principal. Again, innocent persons have their rights violated. How can anyone fail to see that robbery is incompatible with freedom? Finally, the financial rules that Glaeser finds compatible with freedom entail threats of violence against financial transactors who do not follow arbitrary government rules — often extremely foolish and even destructive rules — in making their transactions, notwithstanding the fact that the parties to the transaction may be perfectly willing to proceed without such regulatory compliance. Such regulation is the very opposite of freedom; it is instead the sheer imposition of outside force, intruding on willing transactors, and thereby discouraging them to some extent, if not entirely, with consequent loss of the wealth that such transactions would have created, in addition to the loss of liberty.

Perhaps it is unseemly for someone such as I to make a recommendation to a Harvard professor, yet I cannot resist the urge to suggest that Glaeser read, say, Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market. Expositions of that sort would help him to gain a clearer vision of the distinction between individual freedom and state domination in economic affairs. Glaeser quotes Milton Friedman to good effect in his article, but Friedman’s writings ought to be the beginning, rather than the end of wisdom in this area. In regard to freedom, Friedman’s arguments were good as far as they went, but they did not go nearly far enough. Like Glaser, Friedman was prepared to make many concessions to state power, and his focus on utilitarian arguments, as opposed to moral principles, diminished the intellectual force of his laudable efforts to enlarge the scope of liberty in economic affairs.

Thou shalt not commit adultery with interns who wear dark blue dresses.

Thou shalt not steal – that means you, Congress and the IRS!

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, regardless of what the Kelo decision says.

The wise man’s eyes are in his head; but the fool walketh in darkness just as presidential advisers, especially the economic and foreign-policy advisers, usually do.

“For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” And the assembled federal bureaucrats replied, “At this point, we really don’t have much to lose along those lines.”

The fool hath said in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they have done abominable works; There is none that doeth good. Yet once such a fool hath been elected to Congress, he is virtually certain to be reelected.

For the love of money to be used in reelection campaigns is a root of all kinds of evil.

Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them – which is to say, all of you government officeholders had best resign pronto before your chickens come home to roost.

For I was hungry, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; naked, and ye clothed me. I was sick, and ye visited me. Then, after several years, ye finally cut off my unemployment benefits. How am I supposed to get by now?

And the woman said unto the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden after it has passed USDA inspection.”

And the serpent said unto the woman, “Ye shall not surely die anyhow; ye have Obamacare now.”

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech: bad English.

Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven, but strange to say, the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area prospered mightily despite its even greater wickedness.

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also, as all the big defense contractors know very well.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man and decided to run for public office, I had to speak, understand, and think in exactly the same way, lest I suffer defeat at the hands of an electoral opponent who expressed an even more childish view of the world.

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. And bear this admonition in mind should anyone propose to build a wall across the border with Mexico.

And the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in the United States of America, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows;
and I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the welfare-warfare state.”

A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger, especially at a TSA checkpoint.

It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a government official to enter into the kingdom of God.

For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increases knowledge of political economy increases sorrow.

Why have so many people regarded communism as the most desirable form of social organization?

F. A. Hayek offers a hypothesis in his final book The Fatal Conceit. Hayek argues that human beings act in many ways according to genetic predispositions inherited from a long period of development – a million or more years – during which they lived in small bands similar to, and indeed sometimes nothing more than, extended families. The family, of course, is a sort of communist arrangement: its members, especially the younger ones, live not by producing wealth and exchanging the rights to it among themselves, but by sharing in accordance with at-least-partly altruistic allocations made by the older members. By this means, human beings survived and eventually prospered. Humans who arranged their affairs differently, one presumes, died out, leaving only those who had been molded by and sought to maintain the traditional family arrangement. Little bands and tribes amounted to nothing more than the family writ large and managed their economic affairs accordingly.

When human beings finally began to interact with one another extensively in what Hayek calls “the great society” — the wider world of various tribes and nations and of far-flung markets linking them through commercial exchanges — they retained, according to Hayek, a genetic predisposition to conduct their affairs in the communal fashion of families and small bands from time immemorial. However, Hayek argues further, the altruism and fully-shared information that had undergirded the conduct of the family and the band do not, indeed, cannot exist in the great society. Seeking to replicate those primeval arrangements on a vastly greater scale is a futile quest. It represents only “an atavistic longing after the life of the noble savage.” At its worst, it gives rise to tragic disasters such as those experienced in the twentieth century in Russia, China, and other, similarly collectivized societies.

Hayek’s hypothesis is plausible, but I have no idea whether it is the best interpretation of the persistent human longing for some form of communism. This hypothesis, like most such socio-biological explanations, seems to be a “just so story” – it seems to make sense, but we lack a clear means of testing and possibly refuting it.

Other interpretations of the intellectuals’ penchant for communism certainly have been advanced.

For example, Ludwig von Mises argues in The Anti-Capitalist Mentality that the intellectuals suffer from frustration, envy, and resentment and blame their relatively poor position in the economy and society on “the rich,” especially the capitalists who have gained the greatest wealth by serving consumers most successfully in the markets. The obverse of the intellectuals’ hatred of the free-market system is their yearning for communism or some other system similarly hostile to private property rights.

In an essay titled “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?,”Robert Nozick argues similarly that the intellectuals are people who were good at school work but are not good at practical affairs and therefore fail to gain the great wealth and social position achieved by business people and investors who, however unremarkable they might have been as schoolchildren, have what it takes to succeed in the marketplace. The intellectuals, convinced that the smart people (that is, those who were good at school) should run the world and rise to the top of society, harbor intense resentment toward the people who navigate the market most successfully and hence toward the socioeconomic order that accommodates this success.

Many people have taken notice recently that John Lennon was killed thirty years ago, and a great deal of maudlin sentiment has been on display in this regard. Radio stations have hauled out Lennon’s recording of “Imagine” to adorn this weepy occasion. Although I consider Lennon to have been a gifted song writer, I do not recommend him as a political or social philosopher. Nevertheless, I do not condemn “Imagine” in every regard. The music itself is beautiful and beautifully performed, and I cherish the line, “Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do.” After all, what is a nation-state but a sort of communism in its own right: a violent suppression of competing private protective agencies by a single, all-encompassing, exceedingly presumptive, and often worthless guardian — and a spectacularly obnoxious one, to boot.