Did Adam Smith—celebrated hero of free trade—make a big exception for reasons of national defense? Would he support the Jones ...

Caleb Petitt is a Research Associate for the Independent Institute, where he researches historical political economy, history of economic thought, and trade. He holds a PhD in economics from George ...

In this excerpt from Letter IX of John Rankin’s Letters on American Slavery, Rankin argues that slavery is incompatible with ...

During a time when enslaved Americans sought freedom through escape, Elizabeth Freeman challenged her legal status as ...

Crypto- anarchism has a long and storied history. Even the secret societies that formed under tyrants in the days before mass communication were antecedents. For the sake of brevity, though, let’s ...

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 ...

Hoover, who had long been associated with the more progressive wing of the Republican Party (he had even pondered a run as a Democrat in 1920) [1], was a proactive president who proposed numerous ...

Born into a world of constant religious conflicts, Roger Williams believed the key to peaceful coexistence was absolute freedom of religion, a dangerous and new idea he tested in what would become ...

In this episode we cover Marcus Tullius Cicero, the famed statesman, lawyer, orator, and above all a lover of liberty. Today Cicero is often read only by classical scholars and reluctant students, ...

Retributive punishment refers to punishment for a crime that is carried out for retributive reasons and is justified if there really are good retributive reasons for punishing crime. To get a clear ...

Mutualism, as a particular strain of anarchist thought, develops from a search for equilibrium, for the spontaneous balance of economic forces. 1 At its most basic, mutualism is an ethical principle ...