We Should Be Free Because We Are Equal

Equality should not be a dirty word for libertarians since equality of liberty and equality before the law are in our intellectual DNA.

Imposing Values: An Essay on Liberalism and Regulation

Liberalism comes in two varieties, classical and modern. All liberals support limitations on government power, but modern liberalism favors, while classical liberalism opposes, significant interference with private property rights. N. Scott Arnold’s book on the classical-modern liberal debate focuses on the modern-liberal regulatory agenda, especially employment law (such as collective bargaining rules and antidiscrimination law), health [...]

Not All Choices Are Equal

Opponents of the freedom philosophy never run out of insipid rebuttals. The latest to have a go at it is Martin Wolf of the Financial Times. Wolf ponders the question, “What is the role of the state,” and notes that a “strand” of classical liberalism (or libertarianism) “believes the answer is to define the role [...]

The Importance of History

Learning history is among the most important things classical liberals can do.

Book Reviews – September 2007

• The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements
  
  by Lynne Viola Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
  
• In our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
  by Charles Murray Reviewed by Michael Tanner
  
• Actual Ethics
  by James R. Otteson Reviewed by Tibor Machan
  
• Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History
  by Paul Moreno Reviewed by George C. Leef
  
1Sep2007 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | Continued

Visible and Invisible Hands

Douglas Den Uyl is vice president of educational programs for Liberty Fund. Douglas Rasmussen is a professor of philosophy at St. John’s University . They co-wrote Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (Pennsylvania State University Press). It has often been said that markets are led “as if by an invisible hand” to [...]

The Freeman: An Eyewitness View

The Freeman has a long and distinguished history
in the cause of liberty.

Ludwig von Mises and the Vienna of His Time – Part II

From the time of World War I, Ludwig von Mises’s writings expressed the classical-liberal cosmopolitan conception of man, society, and freedom. Throughout the interwar period his works on the general principles of the liberal market order, the dangerous dead end to which socialist society would lead, and the contradictions and corrupting influences of economic interventionism [...]

Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment

There is a burgeoning movement afoot to redefine Adam Smith as a “liberal” of the contemporary, progressive sort, rather than as the icon of classical liberalism he is standardly taken to be. It has never been a secret that Smith was no anarchist, nor even, probably, a “minarchist.” He argued that the government should undertake [...]