Mencken is fashionable again, and the usual misunderstanding about his life and legacy are all back. Murray N. Rothbard points to the essential political orientation that helps makes sense of his relentless opposition to the welfare-warefare state: Mencken was a libertarian. This is Rothbard's classic study.
Tom DiLorenzo is well able to look out for himself, but one comment in Ken Masugi's review of his book on Lincoln merits our attention.
Most people regard John Stuart Mill as one of the great classical liberals of the nineteenth century. Though Mill made unnecessary concessions to socialism, did he not in On Liberty defend without compromise personal liberty
Abraham Lincoln is incorrectly remembered as a restorer of liberty, while Prussian autocrat Otto von Bismarck is generally seen as a ruthless dictator, eager to sacrifice men to his policy of deciding the future of his countrymen "by blood and iron." Contrary to this view, Adam Young explains why both men should be viewed as allied together in the common cause of destroying the principles of classical liberalism.
Why is The Real Lincoln so much superior to Harry Jaffa’s A New Birth of Freedom? Jaffa offers a purely textual study: he considers, as if he were dealing with Aristotle or Dante,
The free market is not a panacea. It does not eliminate old age, and it won't guarantee you a date for Saturday night. Private enterprise is fully capable of awful screw-ups. But both theory and practice indicate that its screw-ups are less pervasive and more easily corrected than those of government enterprises, including regulatory ones.
What set in motion the explosive technological advance of the last 250 years was the world of ideas. Great thinkers began to understand the internal logic of the market economy and its potential for liberating mankind from poverty, dependency, and despotic rule.
Wilhelm Röpke made it his life's work to help construct and defend the free society, to diagnose the ills of capitalism, and to suggest concrete solutions. Röpke was never shy about criticizing the abuses of the body politic which endangered its health and rendered it defenseless against infections from the far Right and far Left. Röpke favored untrammeled free trade, regional liberties, and respect for traditional peoples and ways of life.
Professor Kirzner’s outstanding book "aims to present, in briefest outline ... the story of Mises in his role of economist" (emphasis removed). In this task, it is eminently successful.
John Locke's great Second Treatise of Government was the decisive influence on the writing of the Declaration of Independence. Here are crucial excerpts.
