Biographies

For while the humanists would hear of no institutional check on state rule, one critical stumbling block still remained: Christian virtue. What was needed, then, to complete the development of absolutist theory, was a theoretician to fearlessly break the ethical chains that still bound the ruler to the claims of moral principle. That man was the Florentine bureaucrat Niccolò Machiavelli.

Tucker was a proponent, in the 19th century, of American individualist anarchism. He opposed war because it destroyed liberty, but he favored the allies. Tucker's contribution was as much through his publishing as his own writing.

George's own attachment to the land tax, rightly critiqued by Rothbard, is a clear case of Rothbard's Law: the tendency of people to specialize in what they are worst at.

Prosperity meant the standing temptation of wealth to loot, and so the German emperors, beginning with Frederick Barbarossa in 1154, began a two-centuries-long series of attempts to conquer the northern Italian cities.

Ultimately, when Rose died — it was in 1968, she was 81 — Roger MacBride inherited everything she owned, including the fabulously valuable rights to the Little House books ostensibly written by her mother...

"What comes out from reading Mises's policy writings is that if you had asked him a fiscal, or monetary, or regulatory-policy question, he would not have said, and did not simply say, 'laissez-faire' — abolish the central bank, deregulate the economy, and eliminate taxes."

Over two decades before the Spanish Jesuit de Mariana, George Buchanan arrived, for the first time, at a truly individualist theory of natural righ

Over two decades before the Spanish Jesuit de Mariana, George Buchanan arrived, for the first time, at a truly individualist theory of natural rights and sovereignty — and therefore a justification for individual acts of tyrannicide.

The powers of the federal government are enumerated; it can only operate in certain cases; it has legislative powers on defined and limited objects, beyond which it cannot extend its jurisdiction.