Mises Daily

Hence, one is forced to conclude that the libertarian ethic not only can be justified and justified by means of a priori reasoning, but that no alternative ethic can be defended argumentatively.

This is the sense in which our fiat-money, fractional-reserve system uses "debt-based money."

We are certainly as far from capitalism in its pure form as we are from any system of central planning. The world of today is just interventionist chaos.

Labor is a factor of production. The price the seller of labor can obtain on the market depends on the data of the market.

Just about everyone is drawn to the libertarian respect for property rights. Yet most people draw back from fully embracing property rights, and taking libertarianism to its fulfillment in "anarchocapitalism" or free-market anarchy.

The bottom line is that, for today's 21-year-old, Social Security is a negative return.

The 26 essays collected in this book were published over the last three decades in a variety of academic journals, scholarly books, policy-report series, and periodicals aimed at the nonspecialist. Several were originally published in electronic periodicals. They share a common theme despite the fact that they were written at different times and for disparate audiences. This theme may be broadly summed up in the term "sound money" as defined by Ludwig von Mises.

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.

For all these reasons, appealing to a monarch to impose laissez-faire from above can only be a losing strategy.

The bottom line is that trade sanctions create poverty.