Democracy and Laissez Faire: the New York State Constitution of 1846
In the 1840s, New York state was home to a powerful mixture of democracy, populism, and free markets. The result was lower taxes and a greatly weakened government.
In the 1840s, New York state was home to a powerful mixture of democracy, populism, and free markets. The result was lower taxes and a greatly weakened government.
The radical French classical liberals were pioneers in market anarchism and they explained how radical laissez-faire was key to battling the "monstrous" state.
The thinking of Say, Comte, and Dunoyer cannot be examined in isolation, divorced from traditional liberal ideas and the intellectual currents of their day. Their class theories cannot be separated from what we might now consider the separate specializations of economics, history and political theory.
An advisor of Richard Nixon and a friend of most Administration economists, Friedman has, in fact, served the regime as a sort of leading unofficial apologist for Nixonite policy.
Present-day prophets of a united Europe share with past conquerors like Napoleon and Hitler a strong preference for a society directed, more or less violently, by a small political elite. All in the name of "eternal peace."
Evolutionary social theory can form part of a liberal theory of politics, but Hayek and Spencer's evolutionary arguments to explain the emergence of freedom in mass societies are deficient.
Mark Thornton provides a historical perspective on the growth of libertarianism, showing the limitations of the political path to liberty and the importance of the radical form of libertarianism.
If property held by the government is "stolen property," is it acceptable for random citizens to “liberate” this property for their own use?
Analyzing property rights in Nigeria from a Rothbardian point of view shows that the major reason for poverty in Nigeria is governmental neglect and abuse of property rights.
Negative liberty, which defines freedom exclusively in terms of independence of the individual from interference by others, is defended against contemporary philosophers Charles Taylor and Martha Nussbaum.