Political Theory

This Libertas Award acceptance speech was delivered at the XXIII Forum da Liberdade, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on April 12, 2010.  Tyranny ends when we cease to support voluntarily our own serfdom.

While Montaigne paved the way for the dominance of absolutist thought in France, surely the founder or at least the locus classicus of 16th-century

Like school vouchers, the flat tax, and other pretenders, the AFV assumes the necessity of state intervention and tries to bend liberty around such strictures.

Among the absolutist writers following Bodin, the 17th-century servitors of the absolute state, all hesitance or piety to the medieval legacy of strictly limited taxation was destined to disappear. State power, unlimited, was to be glorified.

"Governmental taxation provides one mean by which fiat money could come into existence."

The lesson of Mises and Hayek is clear: there is no substitute for the private ownership. Without it, economic calculation in a modern economy cannot take place.

We, this satirical and heretical dystopian futurist book, ends by resolving whether or not the protagonist can find penultimate happiness in the co

It is a favorite conceit of modern, 20th-century liberals that skepticism, the attitude that nothing can really be known as the truth, is the best

"Class interest led him almost always to the side of the smaller political unit against encroachment by the larger, because the greater the power of local self-government, as a rule, the better for the producer and the worse for the exploiter."

At this point it no doubt seems like economists are the wet blankets of the world, but one of the most important implications of careful economic reasoning is that often, your schemes and programs will not just be ineffective, they will be positively destructive.