World History

For all these reasons, appealing to a monarch to impose laissez-faire from above can only be a losing strategy.

The bottom line is that trade sanctions create poverty.

"The true end of man — not that which capricious inclination prescribes for him, but that which is prescribed by eternally immutable reason — is the highest and most harmonious cultivation of his faculties into one whole. For this cultivation, freedom is the first and indispensible condition."

Aristotle concedes too much to those who discriminate in favor of the purely intellectual, and he tends to denigrate the practical life.

Free trade and free markets, through the harmony of reciprocal benefits, advance the interest and happiness of all by each seeking his own personal

So the basic strategy of trying to convert the king led inexorably to at least a broadly utilitarian approach to the problems of freedom and government intervention.

As Barnes noted, there were a number of "middle-class writers" who took more or less this line, but "by far the most influential" of them "was the 17th-century English philosopher, John Locke. Many of his theories were taken up and popularized in America by Thomas Jefferson."

Raico provides a detailed reading of their work in all these respects and shows that one need not embrace statism, and that one can be a consistent and full-blown liberal in the classical tradition, and not come anywhere near fulfilling the stereotype that conservatives were then creating of libertarians.

The truth is that capitalism has poured a horn of plenty upon the masses of wage earners, who frequently did all they could to sabotage the adoptio

Recorded at Mises University 2010.