During the year of the 250th anniversary of American independence, Paul Meany reflects on how the American Declaration ...

For hundreds of years, thinkers have tried to answer this problem by attempting to understand the origin of laws and rights ...

“To my mind the law is not our worst enemy. … Religious bigotry, marital jealousy, social prejudice, will operate in ostracism, contempt…and actual violence.” From Emil F. Ruedebusch, Mayville, Wis., ...

Prosperity and property rights are inextricably linked. The importance of having well-defined and strongly protected property rights is now widely recognized among economists and policymakers. A ...

Libertarianism, and the classical liberalism from which it sprang, supports a strictly limited state, if indeed its adherents recognize the legitimacy of the state at all. The minimal state is a ...

The origin of the idea that liberty could be preserved through the separation of powers endures through the arguments of Polybius. Paul Meany is the editor for intellectual history at Lib er tar i an ...

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 ...

Tom G. Palmer is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, director of the Institute’s educational division, Cato University, Executive Vice President for International Programs at Atlas Network, and ...

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 ...

The 1619 Project and the debate it spurred have both been fraught with conceptual and historical misunderstandings about the relationship between slavery and free markets. Nowadays, historians and ...

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 ...