Samuel Clemens was an old-style liberal of the 19th century sort who believed in economic liberty and warned about the depredations of state power. The failure of many critics to understand the old liberal perspective may be part of the reason his political outlook is so widely misunderstood. His liberalism is woven into the fabric of his most famous works: The Prince and the Pauper and his series of stories involving Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

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The American economist Henry George once said protectionism is the way to inflict on ourselves in peacetime what our enemies inflict on us in wartime. Note, in fact, that the American leaders ban American investments in Iran—so the American regime threatens heavy criminal sanctions for those who would invest in the strategic sectors of the Islamic Republic.

The outstanding merit of Brian Doherty’s book is that it contains a treasure trove of valuable information regarding the events, personalities, periodicals and organizations whose complex interplay influenced the intellectual and institutional development of the modern American libertarian movement. But its merit also becomes its defect in the hands of the author, who appears at times to be completely overwhelmed by the wealth of information he has collected, unable or unwilling to critically evaluate the facts and events he recounts and assimilate them into a coherent narrative.

Holcombe (2004) has written an interesting and challenging but ultimately fallacious essay on government. In his view, this institution is “unnecessary, but inevitable.” I heartily agree with the former contention, but adamantly reject the latter. Worse is the implication for him of the supposed inevitability of the state: since it will come about in any case, we men of good will should strive to set one up ourselves in cases where this has not yet come about, so that our version of it may serve to stave off a later and more virulent strain of it.

In Kropotkin’s pamphlet on Anarchist Morality, he applauded the empiricist philosophers of the 18th-century Enlightenment for rejecting religious interpretations of human action and adopting an account that made the quest of pleasure and avoidance of pain the source of human motivation. Kropotkin joined with Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Chernischevsky in affirming that the desire for pleasure was the true motive of all human action.

Recently, Joe Rogan, one of the largest podcast hosts in the United States (10.6 million YouTube subscribers), expressed the following opinion about the vaccination of young adults:

If you are 21 and ask me if you should get the vaccine, I would say “no”. If you are a healthy person and exercise all the time, and are young and eat well, I don’t think you have to worry about this.