This article appeared in the Spring 2004 issue of The Independent Review My path to Karl Marx was through my work on the Soviet economy. Sovietologists had difficulty comprehending the organizational nature of the Soviet economy because they were uninformed about its Marxian aspirations. Sovietologists regarded Marx as irrelevant to an understanding of the Soviet economy. Alexander Gerschenkron, one of the most distinguished Sovietologists, told...

The Harsh Truth About Outsourcing was published in BUSINESSWEEK, March 2004 It's not a mutually beneficial trade practice -- it's outright labor arbitrage  Economists are blind to the loss of American industries and occupations because they believe these results reflect the beneficial workings of free trade. Whatever is being lost, they think, is being replaced by something as good or better. This thinking is rooted...

Second Thoughts on Free Trade By Charles Schumer and Paul Craig Roberts ''I was brought up, like most Englishmen, to respect free trade not only as an economic doctrine which a rational and instructed person could not doubt but almost as a part of the moral law,'' wrote John Maynard Keynes in 1933. And indeed, to this day, nothing gets an economist's blood boiling more...

This article appeared in the Winter 2003 issue of The Independent Review Supply-side economics is a major innovation in economics. It says that fiscal policy works by changing relative prices and shifting the aggregate supply curve,not by raising or lowering disposable income and shifting the aggregate demand curve. Supply-side economics reconciled micro- and macroeconomics by making relative-price analysis the basis for macro-conclusions. The argument is...

This article by Paul Craig Roberts appeared in the Spring 2003 issue of The Independent Review. The execution of an innocent person cannot be remedied. This fact, together with mounting evidence of innocents on death row, has strengthened opposition to the death penalty. Nevertheless, the death penalty has proved to be a divisive issue. The divide between liberals and conservatives on the death penalty could...

This article by Paul Craig Roberts appeared in the Fall 2002 issue of The Independent Review. The academic study of the Soviet economy was unsuccessful. Several widely held misconceptions contributed to the lack of success. Western economists assumed that economic growth was assured, because the central planning authority controlled the rate of investment. They assumed that the Soviet economy was planned centrally, because it had...

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This article appeared in the Fall 2000 issue of The Independent Review Forward by Alan Reynolds Timothy Muris's otherwise excellent piece "Ronald Reagan and the Rise of Large Deficits" (Independent Review 4 : 365-76), necessarily misses some fascinating details known only to those of us who were actually there. The transition team began operating out of David Stockman's congressional offices shortly after Christmas 1980. That...

This article by Paul Craig Roberts and Norman Van Cott appeared in the Spring 1999 issue of The Independent Review and was presented to an annual conference of the Western Economics Association during the 1970s. People familiar with Michael Polanyi are impressed by his intellectual powers, the range of his mind, and his ability to get to the heart of issues, often long before anyone...