[This lecture was given by the Swiss-French thinker Benjamin Constant in 1819. The French title is “De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes.”]

Introduction by Ralph Raico

“He loved liberty as other men love power,” was the judgment passed on Benjamin Constant by a 19th-century admirer.

It is customary for old-fashioned religion to threaten those whose way of life is not to its satisfaction, with the prospect of hell in the afterlife. Substitute for the afterlife, life on earth in centuries to come, and it is possible to see that environmentalism and the rest of the left are now doing essentially the same thing. They hate the American way of life because of its comfort and luxury, which they contemptuously dismiss as “conspicuous consumption.” And to frighten people into abandoning it, they are threatening them with a global-warming version of hell.

I was a professional chef with a highly regarded firm that served exotic meats such as elephant, giraffe, snake. Ok, I’m exaggerating a little bit. The account of my experience is here.

Brian Doherty’s new book on libertarianism is getting some attention, and rightly so. This review by Justin Raimondo is particularly spirited.

Tyler Cowen provides a nice illustration of the Stockholm Syndrome in this post that points out that social democracy is actually just great after all: “We should embrace a world with growing wealth, growing positive liberty, and yes, growing government.”

Ron Paul has always believed that foreign and domestic policy should be conducted according to the same principles. Government should be restrained from intervening at home or abroad because its actions fail to achieve their stated aims, create more harm than good, shrink the liberty of the people, and violate rights.

Jean-Baptiste is certainly best known for his famous Law of Markets (la loi des débouchés) also referred to as Say’s Law. Though Say’s Law is one of the key points of the classical school of economics, the manner in which this obvious proposition has been distorted and misinterpreted in a significant number of economic textbooks as well as in lectures of certified professors of economics is simply perplexing.

There was a time when we had no viable means to get crocodile and antelope meat, and you could forget about a Yakburger. Now there’s exoticmeats.com