In the 2024 campaign, the presidency itself is the problem.

The modern presidency has become the central fault line of polarization in America because the president, increasingly, has the power to reshape vast swaths of American life. In The Cult of the Presidency, Gene Healy argues that We, the People are to blame. Americans on each side of the red-blue divide demand a president who can create jobs, teach our children well, tend to the national soul--and vanquish their culture-war enemies. Our political culture has invested the office with preposterously vast responsibilities, and as a result, the officeholder wields powers that no human being ought to have.

In a new preface to the 2024 edition, Healy argues that the rise of partisan hatred lends new urgency to the cause of re-limiting executive power. In the years since Cult was first published, politics has gone feral, with polls showing that substantial majorities of Democrats and Republicans view members of the other party as a serious threat to the United States and its people. At the same time, the most powerful office in the world has grown even more so. That's raised the stakes of our political differences dramatically: the issues that divide us most are now increasingly settled by whichever party manages to seize the office. In our partisan myopia, we've laid down the infrastructure for autocratic rule and sectarian warfare, making the presidency powerful enough to tear the country apart.

Interweaving historical scholarship, legal analysis, and trenchant cultural commentary, The Cult of the Presidency traces America's decades‐long drift from the Framers' vision for the presidency: a constitutionally constrained chief magistrate charged with faithful execution of the laws. Restoring that vision will require a Congress and a Court willing to check executive power, but Healy emphasizes that there is no simple legislative or judicial fix. Unless Americans change what we ask of the office--no longer demanding what we should not want and cannot have--we'll get what, in a sense, we deserve.

In this exciting new graphic novel, economist Bryan Caplan examines how changes to housing regulation can lead us to a vastly better world.

Why are housing prices in America so unbelievably high, especially in the country's most desirable locations? The superficial answer is supply and demand, but the deep answer―the reason supply is so low―is a regulatory system that treats developers like criminals.

In Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation, economist Bryan Caplan makes the economic and philosophical case for radical deregulation of this massive market―freeing property owners to build as tall and dense as they wish. Not only would the average price of housing be cut in half, but the building boom unleashed by deregulation would simultaneously reduce inequality, increase social mobility, promote economic growth, reduce homelessness, increase birth rates, help the environment, cut crime, and more.

Combining stunning homage to classic animation with careful interdisciplinary research, Build, Baby, Build takes readers on a grand tour of a bona fide panacea policy. We can start realizing these missed opportunities as soon as we abandon the widespread misconception that housing regulation solves more problems than it causes.

What if economics began with people?

Choice is an essential feature of the human condition. Every time we embark on a given plan of action, big or small, we make a choice. Whereas many economists model people's behavior using idealized assumptions, economists of the Austrian School don't. The Austrian School of Economics takes people as they are and constructs economic theories by examining the logical structure of the choices they make.

This book explains the Austrian School's insights on a wide range of economic topics and introduces some of its key thinkers. It also explains the relationship between the Austrian School and mainstream economics and delves into the criticisms that Austrian School economists have mounted against communist and socialist economic thought.

What is creative destruction? Creative destruction, what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called the essential fact about capitalism, describes change or disruption in the economy caused by innovations that replace traditional technologies and practices. Creative destruction is a force so powerful that it has not only shaped economies but also politics, culture, and social relations. In clear and accessible prose, Dalton and Logan illustrate the nature and varieties of creative destruction, how it is central to innovation and entrepreneurship, and why it is important for economic growth. With in-depth case studies of how Netflix challenged and displaced Blockbuster, and how Uber and other ride-sharing companies are disrupting traditional taxi services, this book examines how economies, societies, and cultures change due to the innovation and experimentation that is central to the prosperity of free societies.

The COVID-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine, simmering US-China tensions, and rising global populism have led to globalization facing renewed attention-and criticism-from politicians and pundits across the political spectrum. Like any market phenomenon, the free movement of people, things, money, and ideas across natural or political borders is imperfect and often disruptive. But it has also produced undeniable benefits-for the United States and the world-that no other system can match. And it's been going on since the dawn of recorded history.

The original essays compiled in this volume offer a diverse range of perspectives on globalization-what it is, what it has produced, what its alternatives are, and what people think about it-and offer a strong, proactive case for more global integration in the years ahead. Covering the basic economic and political ideas and historical facts underlying globalization, rebutting the most common arguments against globalization today, and educating readers on the intersection of globalization and our societies and cultures-from where we live to what clothes we wear and what foods we eat-Defending Globalization demonstrates the essential humanity of international trade and migration, and why the United States and the rest of the world need more of it.

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are on the rise. In an attempt to reinvent money as we know it, central bankers and other policymakers around the world are currently researching, developing, and launching CBDCs. The prospect has caught the attention of the president of the United States, Congress, international institutions, and government contractors, but the public has largely been left out of this development. That needs to change.

CBDCs are not simply another form of money. Rather, CBDCs pose significant risks to financial privacy, freedom, and markets. Furthermore, CBDCs would open the economy to new cybersecurity risks while also jeopardizing the function and independence of central banks themselves. Yet, what is probably worst of all is that CBDCs fail to offer any unique benefits that offset these costs and justify the government's intervention in the market.

In Digital Currency or Digital Control, monetary and financial economic expert Nicholas Anthony provides everything you need to get up to speed on CBDCs so that you can know what is at stake. From the myths of CBDC benefits to the threats posed by CBDC risks, this book will help you decode what CBDC means for the future of money.

Financial markets have fueled American prosperity for more than two centuries, so why are they often distrusted and criticized as harmful?

The United States has had robust financial markets practically from the date the nation was founded. Within several years of ratifying the Constitution, the depth and breadth of America's banking and securities markets rivaled those of any other developed nation. And that's a good thing.

America's financial system is inseparable from America's enormous growth, productivity, and prosperity. And while it's become popular to lay a host of ills at the feet of financial markets, markets are not themselves the cause of financial instability, income stagnation, or declining investment in productive endeavors. While our system is not perfect, many people would likely be shocked to learn just how many financial market deficiencies have been caused by harmful government policies.

By providing historical context and a thorough yet easily accessible explanation of US financial markets, authors Norbert Michel and Jennifer Schulp provide a much-needed counterpoint to current debates and criticisms. Financing Opportunity not only busts many popular myths about financial markets but also proposes ways to improve how our financial markets function. With financial markets and American opportunity so closely tied, financial policy is vital to supporting growth, productivity, and prosperity.

For centuries, the ivory towers of academia have echoed this sentiment of multitudinous ends and limited means. In this supremely contrarian book, Tupy and Pooley overturn the tables in the temple of conventional thinking. They deploy rigorous and original data and analysis to proclaim a gospel of abundance. Economics--and ultimately, politics--will be enduringly transformed. --George Gilder, author of Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

Generations of people have been taught that population growth makes resources scarcer. In 2021, for example, one widely publicized report argued, The world's rapidly growing population is consuming the planet's natural resources at an alarming rate . . . the world currently needs 1.6 Earths to satisfy the demand for natural resources . . . [a figure that] could rise to 2 planets by 2030. But is that true?

After analyzing the prices of hundreds of commodities, goods, and services spanning two centuries, Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley found that resources became more abundant as the population grew. That was especially true when they looked at time prices, which represent the length of time that people must work to buy something.

To their surprise, the authors also found that resource abundance increased faster than the population--a relationship that they call superabundance. On average, every additional human being created more value than he or she consumed. This relationship between population growth and abundance is deeply counterintuitive, yet it is true.

Why? More people produce more ideas, which lead to more inventions. People then test those inventions in the marketplace to separate the useful from the useless. At the end of that process of discovery, people are left with innovations that overcome shortages, spur economic growth, and raise standards of living.

But large populations are not enough to sustain superabundance--just think of the poverty in China and India before their respective economic reforms. To innovate, people must be allowed to think, speak, publish, associate, and disagree. They must be allowed to save, invest, trade, and profit. In a word, they must be free.

Was inflation's recent spike exacerbated by corporate greed? Do rent controls really help the needy? Are U.S. health care prices set in a Wild West marketplace? Do women get paid less than men for the same work, and do they pay more than men for the same products? The War on Prices is an eye-opening book that answers all these burning questions and more, as top economists debunk popular misconceptions about inflation, prices, and value.

Market prices are under siege. The war on prices is waged most obviously with damaging government price controls and the harmful effects of central bank monetary mismanagement, as we saw with the recent inflation. Yet these bad policies are propped up by widespread, misguided public beliefs about the causes of inflation, the effects of price controls, and the inherent morality of market prices.

Breaking down these complex issues into three distinct sections―inflation, price controls, and value―this book both sheds light on long-standing contentions and brings economic theory and evidence to bear in today's most contentious debates. Threaded through the book is a revealing truth: too many of us misunderstand the origin, role, and worth of market prices in our economy. The old insult goes that economists know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The War on Prices shows that good economists―and soon, you―can appreciate the value of unshackled market prices in delivering prosperity.

Economist Bryan Caplan makes a bold case for unrestricted immigration in this fact-filled graphic nonfiction.

American policy-makers have long been locked in a heated battle over whether, how many, and what kind of immigrants to allow to live and work in the country. Those in favor of welcoming more immigrants often cite humanitarian reasons, while those in favor of more restrictive laws argue the need to protect native citizens.

But economist Bryan Caplan adds a new, compelling perspective to the immigration debate: He argues that opening all borders could eliminate absolute poverty worldwide and usher in a booming worldwide economy―greatly benefiting humanity.

With a clear and conversational tone, exhaustive research, and vibrant illustrations by Zach Weinersmith, Open Borders makes the case for unrestricted immigration easy to follow and hard to deny.

In this new edition of his highly praised 1997 book, George Selgin argues that monetary policy should not have the goal of price stability, but should aim to allow prices to move in-line with movements in productivity (the so-called productivity norm). Radical and contrarian, this hugely original book remains a mini-classic.

Over the past two centuries, humanity has experienced unprecedented progress. Extreme poverty has declined, life expectancy has doubled, illiteracy has declined. While we as a species are becoming more prosperous, more educated, healthier, and more peaceful, it is useful to remind ourselves of the underlying cause of this progress: innovation. Human innovation--whether it be new ideas, inventions, or systems--is the primary way people create wealth and escape poverty.

The health and wealth of the modern world rests on the shoulders of dozens of unsung heroes whose work has saved millions, if not billions, of lives. Despite their contribution to improving humanity, few people know the names of these pioneers.

Heroes of Progress takes readers on a journey through the lives of the most important people who have ever lived. From agronomists whose hybrid crops saved billions of lives and intellectuals who changed public policy for the better, to businesspeople whose innovations helped millions rise from poverty, or scientists whose medical breakthroughs eliminated diseases and ended pandemics. If it weren't for the heroes profiled in this book, we'd all be far poorer, sicker, hungrier, ignorant, and less free--if we were fortunate enough to be alive at all. Considering their impact on humanity, perhaps it's time to learn their story?

Financial markets have fueled American prosperity for more than two centuries, so why are they often distrusted and criticized as harmful?

The United States has had robust financial markets practically from the date the nation was founded. Within several years of ratifying the Constitution, the depth and breadth of America's banking and securities markets rivaled those of any other developed nation. And that's a good thing.

America's financial system is inseparable from America's enormous growth, productivity, and prosperity. And while it's become popular to lay a host of ills at the feet of financial markets, markets are not themselves the cause of financial instability, income stagnation, or declining investment in productive endeavors. While our system is not perfect, many people would likely be shocked to learn just how many financial market deficiencies have been caused by harmful government policies.

By providing historical context and a thorough yet easily accessible explanation of US financial markets, authors Norbert Michel and Jennifer Schulp provide a much-needed counterpoint to current debates and criticisms. Financing Opportunity not only busts many popular myths about financial markets but also proposes ways to improve how our financial markets function. With financial markets and American opportunity so closely tied, financial policy is vital to supporting growth, productivity, and prosperity.

In October 2008, as the U.S. economy plunged, the Federal Reserve began paying interest on banks' reserve balances. The resulting switch to a floor system of monetary control, in which changes in the interest rate on reserves, rather than reserve creation or destruction, became the Fed's chief tool for influencing economic activity, was to have far-reaching consequences--almost all of them regrettable.

Besides intensifying the downturn by causing banks to hoard reserves, the floor system all but destroyed the market for unsecured interbank loans that had been banks' ordinary first resort source of last-minute liquidity. By depriving the Fed's asset purchases of the ability to stimulate investment and spending, it also compelled the Fed to compensate by purchasing assets on an unprecedented scale. All of this resulted in a substantial increase in the Fed's role in allocating scarce credit. Finally, by severing the ordinary connection between the stance of monetary policy and the extent of the Fed's asset holdings, the floor system risks turning the Fed's balance sheet into a fiscal-policy playground.

Floored offers a matchless account of our post-crisis monetary system's history and shortcomings.

I would say that learning this material ... has lifted some of the existential weight from me. Things aren't as bad as they are trumpeted to be. In fact, they're quite a bit better, and they're getting better, and so we're doing a better job than we thought. There's more to us than we thought. We're adopting our responsibilities as stewards of the planet rapidly. We are moving towards improving everyone's life. --Jordan B. Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

Think the world is getting worse? You're wrong: the world is, for the most part, is getting better. But 58 percent of people in 17 countries that were surveyed in 2016 thought the world is either getting worse or staying the same rather than getting better. Americans were even more glum: 65 percent thought the world is getting worse and only 6 percent thought it was getting better. The uncontroversial data on major global trends in this book will persuade you that this dark view of the prospects for humanity and the natural world is, in large part, badly mistaken.

World population will peak at 8 to 9 billion before the end of this century as the global fertility rate continues its fall from 6 children per woman in 1960 to the current rate of 2.4. The global absolute poverty rate has fallen from 42 percent in 1981 to 8.6 percent today. Satellite data show that forest area has been expanding since 1982. Natural resources are becoming ever cheaper and more abundant. Since 1900, the average life expectancy has more than doubled, reaching more than 72 years. Of course, major concerns such as climate change, marine plastic pollution, and declining wildlife populations are still with us, but many of these problems are already in the process of being ameliorated as a result of the favorable economic, social, and technological trends that are documented in this book.

You can't fix what is wrong in the world if you don't know what's actually happening. Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know will provide busy people with quick-to-read, easily understandable, and entertaining access to surprising facts that they need to know about how the world is really faring.

How Does the Economy Work?

When we stop to consider it, a free economy is a marvel. Millions of people, mostly unknown to one another, each producing some particular good or service, somehow manage to coordinate their actions in a vast, cooperative, productive order with no one in charge. How does it work?

Economics helps us understand.

This book introduces the concepts on which all of economics is founded, concepts such as subjective value and gains from trade, scarcity and opportunity cost, thinking at the margin, division of labor, and comparative advantage. It then introduces the foundational theory with which we understand how market prices emerge and change to reflect changing conditions: supply and demand analysis.

It also introduces the principles that underlie spontaneous economic order: market prices provide the information we need to coordinate our actions with others' actions, while profit-and-loss feedback guides entrepreneurs as to how best to satisfy others' wants. Private property rights and freedom of exchange give us the incentive to interact in mutually beneficial ways.

How has an archaic, burdensome law been able to persist for a century?

Passed in 1920, the Jones Act restricts the waterborne transport of cargo within the United States to vessels that are U.S.-flagged, U.S.-crewed, U.S.-owned, and U.S.-built. Meant to bolster the U.S. maritime sector, this protectionist law has instead contributed to its decline. As a result, today's U.S. oceangoing domestic fleet numbers fewer than 100 ships. Beyond leaving a shrunken and uncompetitive maritime sector in its wake, the law has also inflicted considerable damage on the broader U.S. public that range from higher transportation costs to increased pollution.

The chapters in The Case against the Jones Act delve into some of the act's founding myths and the false narrative its supporters have helped to perpetuate. The book evaluates the law's costs, assesses its impact on businesses, consumers, and the environment, and offers alternatives for a way forward. The Jones Act's failures reveal that the status quo is untenable. Contributors to this volume hope that the evidence presented will spark discussion about the Jones Act and lay the groundwork for the repeal or significant reform of this outdated law.