• 60 years ago, in the words of one of the Liberty Forum’s contributors, Brad Birzer, Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind arrived “on bookshelves on May 11, 1953, [and] enjoyed a popularity that stunned its author and its publisher.  Nearly every major newspaper, magazine, and journal in the English speaking world reviewed it, sometimes twice, and Kirk became nothing less than a major celebrity for the next decade.  Time magazine even went so far as to label the Michiganian one of the fifteen most important intellectuals in America.”

This month’s Liberty Forum looks to the unwritten constitutionalism of Kirk’s thought that he articulated in The Conservative Mind. Contributions from Gerald Russello, James Matthew Wilson, Brad Birzer, and Gary Gregg provide a fresh understanding of Kirk’s constitutional philosophy.

• Rediscovering the missing element of the ‘dismal science‘ is the subject of the current Liberty Law Talk with John Mueller, director of the Economics and Ethics Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

• Trade Policy Disaster: Lessons from the 1930s, reviewed this week in our Books section by Gerry O’Driscoll who opines that Irwin’s “analysis relies on a trilemma articulated by Milton Friedman: “fixed exchange rates, stable internal prices, unrestricted multilateral trade; of this trio, any pair is attainable; all three are not simultaneously attainable.””

• I think that Yuval Levin provides the best comprehensive analysis of the delay of the Obamacare employer mandate.

• Thoughts on the very American pursuit of happiness.

• New findings from Shlaes and Nash on Silent Cal and the 1929 crash.

• Richard Rahn looks to the free market path not taken by Ecuador, and the growth experienced by its neighbor Chile who took the road less traveled.