In 1949, amid the disbelief of New York’s intelligentsia, a newly-arrived professor from Europe—courteous in manner and relentless in argument—began teaching at New York University. His name was Ludwig von Mises—a refugee from Nazi tyranny, but above all, an exile from an academic world that had embraced statism with the same passion it had once devoted to progress.

One hundred sixty years after the war for Southern independence, great confusion is still caused by the claim that the South fought for their independence and for “states’ rights.” What does the doctrine of “states’ rights” mean in this context? The dictionary definition is easily understood: “the rights and powers held by individual US states rather than by the federal government.”