Taxpayers and Tax Spenders: Does a Zero Tax Price Matter?
Bruce Yandle, Jody W. Lipford

James Madison and John Calhoun were right to worry that the wrong fiscal regime would spell the demise of limited government. The enactment of the federal income tax eroded a traditional constraint on government spending and set the stage for the redistribution of wealth from taxpayers to tax consumers.

Alchemy Leveraged: The Federal Reserve and Modern Finance
Roger W. Garrison

Kevin Dowd and Martin Hutchinson’s Alchemists of Loss: How Modern Finance and Government Regulation Crashed the Financial System (2010) presents a superior analysis of the origins of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Although the authors cite the Federal Reserve as the main institutional cause of the crisis, they call for it to pursue Volcker-style price stability—a monetary policy that would still leave the economy vulnerable to Fed-induced booms and busts.

The Silencing of Soldiers
Laurie L. Calhoun

For more than fifty years, the U.S. Defense Department has sponsored drug studies and brain research that aim to minimize soldiers’ all-too-human reticence to kill. The preemptive prescription of drugs intended to reduce soldiers’ self-doubts and anxieties may serve a strategic military purpose, but increasingly it comes at the expense of soldiers’ long-term well-being.

Mario Vargas Llosa: An Intellectual Journey
Julio H. Cole

An admirer of the Cuban Revolution until well into his career, Nobel laureate novelist and essayist Mario Vargas Llosa has become the most prominent exponent of classical liberalism in the Spanish-speaking world. His political migration away from the left reflects his gradual disenchantment with ideology and fanaticism, themes reflected in his great novels The War at the End of the World and The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta.