Like many libertarians, I used to accept without question the idea that contracting out for government services was a good idea. After all, it puts production back into the hands of relatively efficient private producers. However, after reviewing the literature on contracting out for law enforcement services I had some second thoughts, concluding that while contracting out might solve some problems of government inefficiency, other more serious problems would remain.

Volume 11, Number 1 (1994)

There is perhaps no greater confusion in all of political economy than that between libertarianism and libertinism. That they are commonly mistaken for one another is an understatement of the highest order. For several reasons, it is difficult to compare and contrast libertarianism and libertinism. First and most important, on some issues the two views do closely resemble one another, at least superficially. Second-perhaps purely by accident, perhaps due to etymological considerations-the two words not only sound alike, but are spelled almost identically.

In reviewing the contributions of Adam Smith to the growth of economics Hans Brems writes that “[m]uch of what Smith had to say had been said before—but in French. Academic etiquette of his day demanded no acknowledgements, and he offered none.” This is an unusually clear statement of a point of view that appears to circulate through much of the economics profession. Adam Smith, it would appear, borrowed much without acknowledgement.

Journal of Libertarian Studies 11, no. 1 (1994)

The eighteenth-century opponents of the U.S. Constitution have been derided by some historians as politically naive and intellectually inferior to their Federalist counterparts.

Two objection have recently been made to the model of the free market without government. These objections suggest that the model may be self-defeating, in at least two different ways. The problems about to be discussed have been raised by Robert Nozick in his recent Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and have been used by him to argue against the model, and on behalf of what he calls the “minimal state”.

Volume 1, Number 1; 1977

Professor Spengler refers to Richard Cantillon as the first of the modems. Professor Tarascio presents him from a current perspective. But it was the world as he knew it that Cantillon sought to explain. Inevitably he was a man of his time and it is primarily in that light that I should like to look at him. In so doing I shall concentrate on three of the topics with which Professor Tarascio deals, namely, value, money, and the entrepreneur.

Volume 7, Number 2 (1985)

The Mises Institute is honored to be taking over the public action of The Journal of Libertarian Studies, one of the most important scholarly journals to appear in the history of ideas. In a market too often dominated by conventional wisdom, academic log-rolling, and risk-averse research with no practical application, the JLS, from its inception in 1977, has been committed to providing an outlet for cutting-edge thought that engages the world we live in. The table of contents of back issues is the best proof.

Volume 14, Number 2 (2000)

It is the task of this paper to describe what can happen to “a good cause” when it is “ineptly defended,” and to address the problem of the relationship between a verbal free-market support and advocacy in general on one hand, and practical political statements and policy measures adopted by these rhetorically free market politicians on the other. All this will be grounded in the experience of the people of the Czech Republic after the annus mirabilis of 1989, so the real examples from the development since 1990 will provide the analysis with some empirical evidence.

Thomas Sowell provides examples of people from many parts of the world demanding that their governments restrict the economic and occupational success of specific ethnic or racial groups. However, when the same people act as individuals or business owners, they actively resist and/or circumvent these restrictions.

Volume 14, Number 2 (2000)

The Free Market 1, no. 1 (Fall 1983)

In 1981 the Federal Register published a declaration from President Reagan: “I determine that it is in the national interest for the Export-Import Bank of the United States to extend a credit in the amount of $120.7 million to the Socialist Republic of Romania (for) the purchase of two nuclear steam turbine generators.”

This loan carried an interest rate of 7¾% for ten years, but the first payment wasn’t due until July, 1989.