Eco-nomics: What Everyone Should Know About Economics and the Environment by Richard L. Stroup. Softcover: 100 pages. (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2003.) Amazon Price: $9.95.

Eco-nomics: What Everyone Should Know About Economics and the Environment adroitly illustrates the vitality of market processes and private property rights while making it clear that the market is not incompatible with civil society's desire to protect the environment. Far from being detrimental to the environment, a liberal market economy, particularly over time, serves our societal goal of environmental protection. Stewardship capitalism works. Private property encourages good stewardship and accountability, and making more "commons" is not necessarily advantageous to cause of environmental protection by any means. Many laws have been enacted to preserve scenic natural beauty and prevent pollution, but such regulations often have unintended consequences.

Diseconomies of Scale: Dismembering Leviathan by Donald W. Livingston

“Free trade,” like “free love,” is a beguiling abstraction that hides more than it reveals. Absolute free trade would be an exchange of commodities between two people without the coercive intervention of a third party. But economic exchange is always embedded in a cultural landscape of noneconomic values, which impose restraints. Blue laws prevent trade on Sundays, medieval Christendom prohibited charging interest on money, and some think no decent society could legalize the sale of or firearms. If someone disagrees with these restraints, it is because he rejects the moral ideals they express, not because he favors “free trade.” Within the restrictions imposed by usury laws, trade flourished in medieval Europe; indeed, it gave rise to the practices we call “capitalism” today. Those who value liberty may seek to minimize these constraints, but economic relations cannot exist outside of noneconomic restraints.

Pearce, Joseph, Small is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered, (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), Retail: $18.00, Amazon.com: $12.24.

Review by Ryan Setliff

Economics As If Families Mattered

Small is Still Beautiful is a less a biography of a man, and more the biography of one man's idea — namely the humane scale vision of economist E.F. Schumacher. Schumacher was born in Bonn, Germany in 1911, and himself the son of an economist and professor. In his youth, E.F. Schumacher studied in Bonn and Berlin in his native Germany. Later in went to England to study as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, before going to Columbia University in New York City where he earned his Economics degree. According to The Times Literary Supplement, his book Small is Beautiful is among the one-hundred most influential books published in the post-WWII era. Beginning with the publication of this book in 1971, Schumacher issued a clarion call for the world to wake up, and start humanizing its economic structures, rather than continue lurking blindly in the wrong direction of centralization, environmental degradation, globalization and obsessive pursuit of material wealth.

Roepke, Wilhelm, A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market, Hardcover: 261 pages, (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 3d. ed., 1998), Retail: $24.95, Amazon.com: $16.47.

Review by Ryan Setliff

A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market is an insightful look at the social and political framework of the market economy and an intellectual broadside against collectivism and state reckless state intervention in the economy. Economist Wilhelm Röpke was a brilliant German-born economic, social and political thinker, and perhaps my favorite amongst the so called "Austrian school." He devoted much of his scholarly career to combating the intellectual's obsession for collectivism in economic, social, and political theory. Röpke stands apart from his colleagues in that he thinks on a more humane level rejecting crude utilitarian calculations in favor of sound empirical reasoning and moral considerations rooted in culture.

This brilliant German economist of the "Austrian school" stood up to the centralising and dehumanising policies of the Nazis, and later the Soviets. Röpke boldly affirmed that collectivist ideologies lay waste to civil society, thus destroying the intermediary institutions between individual and state. When the omnipotent state acts to supplant the natural civil associations with state institutions that aggrandize state power, it dissolves the moral fabric of communities, saps a nation's economic vitality and usually leads to twin perils of centralisation and atomisation. Furthermore, Röpke was keenly aware of the limitations of the market economy, and was adamant that economic questions cannot be answered in a vacuum devoid of moral considerations. Röpke would attest that mammon is not the measure of all things. In his eyes, the intangibles — that is to say faith, family and tradition — are those things that animate life and give it meaning. Röpke recognised the limitations of the market economy. Röpke insisted, "Economism, materialism, and utilitarianism have in our time merged into a cult of productivity, material expansion, and the standard of living. This cult proves once again the evil nature of the absolute, the unlimited and the excessive" (p. 109). A humane economy was not grounded in progressive notions of unlimited growth, but in a realism that accentuated the recognition of the moral conditions necessary for sustaining a prosperous, free market economy. He observed,