it is only when great and good men are at the head of a nation that the people can expect to succeed in forming such barriers to counteract recent encroachments on their rights; and whenever a nation is so supine as to suffer such an opportunity to be lost, they will soon feel that the danger was not over.
But the most effective mechanism ever devised for making effective pooling of our faculties as easy as it can be — the free market — is also the natural result of reducing general laws to a bare minimum and leaving people free to make their own choices about their own values.
For all these reasons, appealing to a monarch to impose laissez-faire from above can only be a losing strategy.
Men of influential and privileged status are rarely inclined to toss all their privileges aside to engage in the lonely and dangerous task of worki
Whatever their motives may have been, whatever at any given moment they thought of themselves as doing, Anthony Ashley Cooper and John Locke advanced the libertarian idea, just as John Lilburne did. All three of them are part of the libertarian tradition.
"The true end of man — not that which capricious inclination prescribes for him, but that which is prescribed by eternally immutable reason — is the highest and most harmonious cultivation of his faculties into one whole. For this cultivation, freedom is the first and indispensible condition."
– Wilhelm von Humboldt
Only such a spirit could succeed in building a movement, Austrian and libertarian, twice in his distinguished career.
"The more controls and taxation a State imposes on its people," Sam wrote, "the more they will evade and defy them.
Recorded at Mises University 2010. Includes an introduction by Mark Thornton.
