Saint Augustine There is an ancient saying, attributed to Aesop: “We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to ...

In Man Versus the State, Herbert Spencer argues that as the state tries to regulate more of our lives, it inches us closer to slavery. What is essential to the idea of a slave? We primarily think of ...

Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments included this passage about spontaneous order vs planned economy. Adam Smith was a Scottish political philosopher and economist, considered one of the ...

So far, Menger has gently revised Classical Economics. Once subjective and marginal utility enter the equation, though: a revolution is underway. So far in our explorations in early Austrianism, Carl ...

Thoreau describes his brief imprisonment and discusses the relationship between the state, his community, and his duties as an individual. …Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true ...

Emma Goldman discusses the nature of the state as an institution and how it is fundamentally at odds with the dignity of the individual. Emma Goldman was a socialist anarchist activist, writer, and ...

In this excerpt from On Liberty, Mill argues that the right of an individual to her own opinion isn’t only good for her, but for the rest of society. The time, it is to be hoped, is gone by when any ...

Thomas Paine critiques and expounds upon ideas of government. Claiming it is but a “necessary evil” and distinguishing it from society at large. Some writers have so confounded society with government ...

Hume argues that rules of justice do not spring fully- formed from rational calculation but emerge from the uncoordinated actions of individuals. David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, ...

Burke writes in Reflections on the Revolution in France that good statecraft is the maintenance and refinement of inherited institutions The moment you abate anything from the full rights of men each ...

Edmund Burke describes how the new rulers of France “despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men.” From Reflections on the Revolution in France. After I had read over the list of the persons ...

Philatelic historian Van Dyk Macbride wrote the only significant biography of one of libertarianism’s unknown heroes. Our current series, therefore, presents the biography of one such tireless and ...