In this excerpt from Letter IX of John Rankin’s Letters on American Slavery, Rankin argues that slavery is incompatible with ...

During a time when enslaved Americans sought freedom through escape, Elizabeth Freeman challenged her legal status as ...

Crypto- anarchism has a long and storied history. Even the secret societies that formed under tyrants in the days before mass communication were antecedents. For the sake of brevity, though, let’s ...

The socialist calculation debate revolves around the question of whether central planners can, at least in principle, make the economic calculations necessary to achieve the rational, efficient ...

Hoover, who had long been associated with the more progressive wing of the Republican Party (he had even pondered a run as a Democrat in 1920) [1], was a proactive president who proposed numerous ...

The ancient Indian writer Kautilya had more knowledge of economic affairs than any thinker for over a thousand years. The Sanskrit Arthashastra, a manual for establishing a prosperous state written in ...

In this episode we cover Marcus Tullius Cicero, the famed statesman, lawyer, orator, and above all a lover of liberty. Today Cicero is often read only by classical scholars and reluctant students, ...

Retributive punishment refers to punishment for a crime that is carried out for retributive reasons and is justified if there really are good retributive reasons for punishing crime. To get a clear ...

Mutualism, as a particular strain of anarchist thought, develops from a search for equilibrium, for the spontaneous balance of economic forces. 1 At its most basic, mutualism is an ethical principle ...

The stereotypes of libertarian attitudes toward the poor range from indifference to outright hostility. Yet a libertarian world would offer the poor a greater opportunity to escape poverty, become ...

Mill opens On Liberty by explaining the nature of liberty versus authority. Traditionally, liberty was defined as “the protection against the tyranny of political rulers” (Mill 2015, p. 5) To achieve ...