Why Taxes Were So Hated in the Middle Ages

By now, it’s a very well known historical narrative: during the Middle Ages, kings were all powerful over their subjects. They ruled with a divine right, and therefore could raise taxes at will. After all, as God’s chosen rulers on earth, who would contradict them? Certainly not the king’s subject who, with the help of the Church, were all utterly cowed by the idea that to disobey the king was to risk eternal damnation. 

Government’s Eternal Hunger for a Free Lunch

Say’s Law of Markets advances the self-evident truth that supply and demand are two sides of the same coin, meaning one can view economic output as supply as well as demand. Demand is measured by what producers produce. Supply is measured by what producers produce.

In a state of nature, one’s own economic demand is dependent on and measured by one’s production. Survival requires people to work to that end. As civilization emerged, producers began trading with one another, exchanging something they had for something they wanted.

Going Off the Rawls

John Rawls can be called many things, but “libertarian” isn’t one of them. To combine Rawls and libertarianism doesn’t seem like a promising project, but this is just what John Tomasi, a political philosopher who taught at Brown University when his book Free Market Fairness was published in 2012, attempted to do. The book remains the best and most comprehensive defense of the position just described.

Jefferson’s War on the Barbary Pirates Is an Unjustified Password for Military Intervention

A few early episodes of US history are commonly employed as alleged historical precedents and justifications for modern US foreign interventionism in foreign policy. One such episode is Jefferson’s dealings with the Barbary pirates during his administration without a congressional declaration of war.