Monetary Tyranny: How Legal Tender Laws Paved the Way and How Competition Sets Us Free

Each day we are reminded of this legal imposition by the familiar phrase stamped on every US dollar bill: “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.” Innocuous on the surface, but these words conceal a profound immorality that strikes at the heart of voluntary exchange. If a man of sound mind agrees to settle a contract in X, then he should be obligated to pay X. Forcing him to accept anything other than X as payment is an egregious violation of contractual and property rights.

The Importance of Using Words Honestly

You might deem it self-evident that words should have meanings, but a growing number of people believe words can mean anything the speaker wants. It seems we now inhabit the fictional world imagined by Lewis Carroll, where, as Humpty Dumpty said, any word “means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” In the recent “what is a woman” debates, some argued that the word “woman” means whatever anyone feels the word woman should mean.

Thanksgiving: Bradford’s 1623 Reform: Necessity, Ideology, and the Emergence of Modern Economic Thought

The transformation that occurred in Plymouth Colony in 1623, when Governor William Bradford abandoned the communal labor system and reassigned corn plots to individual households, has long been misunderstood. Popular narratives either reduce it to a bare logistical adjustment necessitated by famine or inflate it into a proto-capitalist awakening. Both interpretations flatten the complexity of what Bradford actually witnessed and recorded.