Common Law Liberalism: A New Theory of the Libertarian Society by John Hasnas. Oxford University Press 2024. 328pp.

Sabrina Carpenter has been a star since she was 12, staring on Disney’s Girl Meets World. Now she’s a singer and, I’ve heard, she has broken records set by the Beatles. She’s recorded a catchy cover of Nancy Sinatra‘s 1965 hit “These Boots Are Made For Walking.” 

Americans from Florida to North Carolina continue to deal with the devastating consequences of Hurricane Helene, now the deadliest hurricane to hit the US since Katrina. The stories emerging from the region are heart breaking. The economic damage to property and the infrastructure will take years to recover from. Large parts of the area will never return to what they were.

Donald Trump’s ascendancy in the Republican Party fissured the GOP. Increasingly alienated, the GOP’s neoconservative wing flocks more and more to the Democrats.

Labor unions are exempted from federal antitrust laws including the Sherman Antitrust Act, which outlaws “conspiracies in restraint of trade.” This is not a bad thing: Everyone should be exempted from antitrust laws. They are an assault on property rights and because their rulings are so arbitrary they are incompatible with justice and fairness. They are also a tool of rent-seeking businesses who practice “lawfare” by routinely suing their superior competitors for dropping their prices, improving their products, and serving their customers better than they do.

Fundamentally, there are only two forms of economic and political organization—centralized or distributed. The distributed model is based upon the principle of subsidiarity, which is, “an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority.” Governments today are in the centralized category. By contrast, the free market—to the extent it was allowed to operate in the age of classical liberalism—was a model of power distribution.