Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek's 1944 work, The Road to Serfdom, analyzes the ways in which excessive government planning can erode democracy. Published while World War II still raged, the work draws influential parallels between the totalitarianism of both socialism and Nazism and increasing control exerted by Western democracies.

Friedman did not just demonstrate that monetary policy plays a vital role in broader economic stability. He also argued that economists got their monetary policy wrong in the 1950s and 1960s by misunderstanding the relationship between inflation and unemployment. In Friedman's view, previous generations of economists had no justification for believing that governments could permanently decrease unemployment by allowing inflation - and vice versa.

In his best-selling 2013 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty takes issue with the idea that, despite the odd bump along the way (not least the 2007-08 global financial crisis), inequality tends to decline as capitalism matures. Piketty spent 15 years building an unparalleled database on wealth and income in France, the United States, and a number of other countries. He uses this data to argue that the opposite is true. Capitalism's natural tendency is, he says, to move toward ever-greater inequality.

The Talmud says: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” This instinct to take every measure, even the most aggressive, to defend the Jewish people is hardwired into Israel’s DNA. From the very beginning of its statehood in 1948, protecting the nation from harm has been the responsibility of its intelligence community and armed services, and there is one weapon in their vast arsenal that they have relied upon to thwart the most serious threats: Targeted assassinations have been used countless times, on enemies large and small....

The Vision of the Anointed is a devastating critique of the mindset behind the failed social policies of the past thirty years. Thomas Sowell sees what has happened not as a series of isolated mistakes, but as a logical consequence of a vision whose defects have led to disasters in education, crime, family disintegration, and other social pathology. In this book, "politically correct" theory is repeatedly confronted with facts-and sharp contradictions between the two are explained in terms of a whole set of self-congratulatory assumptions held by political and intellectual elites.