A Famine of Critical Thinking

Here's a letter that I sent today to the Wall Street Journal:

John Lahey alleges that the Irish potato famine was caused by "British laissez-faire policies" (Letters, April 8).  Not so.  This calamity was caused by British prohibitions on land-ownership by the Catholic Irish, burdensome taxation, and public-works projects that built roads that were useless for carrying goods and foodstuffs from places where they were abundant to places where they were in short supply.

The great 19th-century...