Saint Augustine There is an ancient saying, attributed to Aesop: “We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.” The comparison between government and robbery is often ...

Larry Reed revisits “I, Pencil” with reflections on the global market. Economist and historian Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed is president emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global ...

Did Adam Smith—celebrated hero of free trade—make a big exception for reasons of national defense? Would he support the Jones Act of today? Caleb Petitt argues that a careful reading of Smith on the ...

Andrew Jackson conflated his own will with the will of the people, and ran roughshod over the Constitution’s constraints on his power in pursuit of goals that were often contemptible. Miles Smith IV ...

Klein assesses George Will’s two most renowned books, 36 years apart, Statecraft as Soulcraft (1983) and The Conservative Sensibility (2019), finding some changes upon an underlying continuity—rather ...

Crypto- anarchism is a philosophy whose advocates think technology can assist them in creating communities based on consent rather than coercion. Crypto- anarchists wish to be free from state ...

The socialist calculation debate revolves around the question of whether central planners can, at least in principle, make the economic calculations necessary to achieve the rational, efficient ...

Vincent Geloso is an assistant professor of economics at George Mason University. He holds a Ph.D. in Economic History from the London School of Economics. He is the author of Du Grand Rattrapage au ...

Paul Meany is the editor for intellectual history at Lib er tar i an ism .org, a project of the Cato Institute. Most of his work focuses on examining thinkers who predate classical liberalism but ...

The libertarian principle on which the legitimacy of labor unions depends is freedom of association. Any person has a natural right to associate with any other person or group for any purpose that ...

While Karl Marx hated Pierre- Joseph Proudhon and his philosophy of mutualism, a libertarian can find in it much to appreciate. Although Herbert Spencer has been rightly regarded as the most ...

A libertarian world won’t eliminate all poverty, but it offers powerful tools for greatly reducing it, and improving the lives of the poorest and least privileged. Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at ...