Part of the experience of reading Newsweek in the early 1960’s was a weekly column called "Business Tides." It offered wide-ranging and insightful commentary on just about anything that had anything to do with the economy or with economics.
There is a fundamental fact about the world that has profound implications for the supply of natural resources and for the relationship between production and economic activity on the one side and man's environment on the other: the entire earth consists of solidly packed chemical elements.
If it were not for the police, lawlessness and chaos would rule; therefore, we owe our safety, our civilization, our very lives to the selflessness and dedication of the police; thus, police are our "heroes." So we were told, and so we believed.
Principles of Politics was written in the immediate aftermath of Napoleon's rule over France and much of Europe. It is a defense of all forms of freedom against despotism. Constant considered natural rights to be the best foundation for liberty.
In the pipeline are dumb regulations for almost everything that plugs in or fires up in your home. The administration is meddling with every room in the house, goofing up technology and raising prices.
Though he devoted much of his life to writing, editing, publishing, and political activism, it isn't really for any of these activities that Jo Labadie should be remembered fondly by libertarians in the 21st century.
Herbert Spencer is often misrepresented in textbooks and websites as a "social Darwinist," but these claims describe a mythical Spencer that never existed. The real Spencer was quite different. The real Spencer often expressed views quite similar to modern-day libertarians.
John Locke, the Protestant Scholastic, was essentially in the hard-money, metallist, anti-inflationist tradition of the Scholastics; his opponents, on the other hand, helped set the tone for the inflationist schemers and projectors of the next century.
God forbid someone anger the hyperactive trade unions. They will use force, seize the economy, and fervently hunt down anyone who dares to think that each worker is responsible to consumers and not to union leaders.
Other elementary texts will continue to be effective in conveying economic basics, but Peter Schiff and his brother, Andrew Schiff, have a story to tell, an extension of a tale first developed by their father, Irwin Schiff. There's nothing quite like a story to get people turning the pages.
