Some in the news described Mary Schapiro, former head of the SEC, as a "fox guarding the chicken coop," with regard to individual investors but readers should understand that regulatory agencies exist to protect the industry not the public. Schapiro has done a good job for both Wall Street and its regulatory bodies, which are controlled by the same special interests, and they have paid her accordingly.

Kant's central concept was that our practical reason or innate sense of knowing will forge cosmopolitan federations of free republics based on the rules of human rights and cultural and commercial expansion. That concept still resonates as a plausible and achievable prescription for humanity's future. Modern warfare, however, has departed from what was once commonly considered the comprehensible rationale for war and its depredations.

In Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, Murray Rothbard traces economic ideas from ancient sources to show that laissez-faire liberalism and economic thought itself began with the scholastics and early Roman, Greek, and canon law. He celebrates Aristotle and Democritus, for example, but loathes Plato and Diogenes. He is kind toward Taoism and Stoicism.