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 ...

Anarchism is the philosophical opposition to authority — social, political, and economic — together with the correspondent belief that the state ought to be abolished, that is, that society could and ...

A discussion of the origins of the Great Depression is necessary to understand the mischaracterization of Hoover as a do- nothing president. First, the Great Depression was an exceptionally large ...

Ronald Reagan is beloved by American conservatives and by many Americans who advocate for limited government. Reagan is difficult to evaluate because in the last 30 years Reagan’s legacy has undergone ...

In my last four essays, I discussed the ideas of Thomas Hodgskin. No discussion of Hodgskin would be complete without considering his great classic, The Natural and Artificial Right of Property ...

Critiques of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, especially from conservatives and libertarians, generally center on his economic response to the Great Depression. This preoccupation is ...

In its long march toward full- spectrum dominance of American life, the American presidency has become both absurd and menacing. Our political culture has invested the office with preposterously vast ...

The two philosophers are considered geniuses in their own right, but they disagreed on the particulars of how best to live a virtuous life. One of their most fundamental disagreements- - and one that ...

The people of the State of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, on the 26th day of April, A.D., 1852, declared that the frequent violations of the Constitution of the United States, by the Federal ...

Monroe took office in a nation that still bore the scars of the recent War of 1812. His inauguration occurred in a hastily constructed addition to the Capitol, because the British had burned the ...