All Posts Tagged With: "Thomas Jefferson"

The Right to Be Left Alone

“The makers of the Constitution conferred the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by all civilized men—the right to be let alone.” -Justice Louis D. Brandeis According to Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, one of the “repeated injuries and usurpations” committed against the American people by the King of England [...]

1May2002 | | 1 comment | Continued

Nullification: The Jeffersonian Brake on Government

Thinkers in the classical-liberal tradition, to the extent that they support a coercive state at all, speak routinely of the importance of keeping government strictly limited. To that end, the United States has a written Constitution, which enumerates the relatively brief list of tasks entrusted to the federal government and whose Tenth Amendment makes clear [...]

1Mar2002 | | 1 comment | Continued

Capital Letters

The State of the Comic Book To the Editor: I enjoyed Raymond Keating’s article on comic books in the May 2001 issue of Ideas on Liberty. I was surprised to see something like this covered in the magazine, and he did the topic justice. His comments on Captain America were particularly enlightening, since I had [...]

1Sep2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

Freedom of Education: A Civil Liberty

Barry Loberfeld is a freelance writer. One of the most amazing things about the many organizations and individuals who designate themselves “civil libertarians” (with the ACLU, naturally, being the most emblematic) is the utter absence of educational liberty from their shared agenda. It’s not even a blip on their screen. Why? Because it’s not explicitly [...]

1Aug2001 | | 2 comments | Continued

American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding

At the time of independence, virtually all Americans believed, with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that government derives its “just powers from the consent of the governed.” Yet the principle of popular sovereignty does not indicate how a people can be organized so that they may exercise their right to establish new government. [...]

1Sep2000 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Declaration of Independence: It’s Greek to Me

The stirring words of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence said that all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights. To Jefferson these rights existed before the founding of government and the function of government is “to secure these rights.” But he himself said that his ringing words did not express a new idea: “This was the object of the Declaration of Independence.

1Aug2000 | | 0 comments | Continued

Nock on Education

The self-proclaimed “philosophical anarchist” Albert Jay Nock thought he was so superfluous to the society around him that he titled his 1943 autobiography Memoirs of a Superfluous Man. He felt utterly out of step with the twentieth century. Born in 1870, he witnessed the severe societal changes resulting from world wars, revolutions in ideology, and [...]

1Jan2000 | | 2 comments | Continued

States’ Rights Revisited

Lamenting the Supreme Court’s recent batch of pro-federalism decisions, the New York Times termed the Court’s newfound affinity for states’ rights “Supreme mischief,” “deeply disturbing” to right-thinkers everywhere. One expects such talk from dedicated cheerleaders for centralized power. What’s more disturbing, however, is the extent to which the Times’s perspective has gained credence among advocates [...]

1Dec1999 | | 7 comments | Continued

Commodity and Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776-1970

Bradley Smith is associate professor of law at Capital University Law School, Columbus, Ohio. To discuss the meaning of property is, in many ways, to discuss the meaning of liberty. If property is an individual right, secure from encroachment by government, then government power is necessarily restricted by the existence of property. If, on the [...]

1May1999 | | 0 comments | Continued

Hamilton’s Republic: Readings in the American Democratic Nationalist Tradition

David Upham is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Dallas. In this anthology, Michael Lind has compiled excerpts from speeches and writings by important American statesmen and intellectuals that are illustrative of what Lind calls the Hamiltonian or “Democratic Nationalist Tradition.” Included among the Democratic Nationalists are such figures as Alexander [...]

1Nov1998 | | 1 comment | Continued

The Arc of the Pendulum: A Philosophy for Government in the 21st Century

In The Arc of the Pendulum, Charles Stewart Goodwin advocates moving government power from the national to the local level and narrowing the scope of government at all levels. He calls this philosophy antifederalism, after the philosophy of those who opposed ratification of the U.S. Constitution on grounds that the central government would be too [...]

1Oct1998 | | 1 comment | Continued

Who Said What About Liberty? (a quiz)

The literature of liberty offers double pleasure. You can often enjoy both dynamic ideas and great eloquence. Just for fun, see if you can match the following unforgettable quotations with their authors. The quotations are representative views of many of the greatest thinkers in the history of liberty: A. Lord Acton B. Benjamin Franklin C. [...]

1Jul1997 | | 1 comment | Continued

The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800 by Conor Cruise O’Brien

University of Chicago Press • 1996 • 385 pages • $29.95 Dr. Skoble is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southeast Missouri State University. Although Thomas Jefferson is popularly known as a great statesman, historians have long been aware that he, like everyone else, was not as purely good as his popular image would suggest. [...]

1Jul1997 | | 1 comment | Continued

What Big Government Is All About

This article is excerpted from Libertarianism: A Primer. Government has an important role to play in a free society. It is supposed to protect our rights, creating a society in which people can live their lives and undertake projects reasonably secure from the threat of murder, assault, theft, or foreign invasion. By the standards of [...]

1Apr1997 | | 1 comment | Continued

The Southern Tradition: Implications for Modern Decentralism

Mr. Woods, a founding member of the Southern League, is a doctoral candidate in history at Columbia University. This paper was delivered in June 1996 at the E.F. Schumacher Society Decentralist Conference held at Williams College in Massachusetts. The American tradition of decentralism has attracted adherents on both sides of the ideological spectrum and from [...]

1Dec1996 | | 1 comment | Continued

Why Not Slavery?

Bertel M. Sparks (1918-1994) was a professor of law at New York University and later at Duke University, and a trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education. This previously unpublished article was originally prepared as a speech for a FEE summer seminar. Upon first impression, it might appear a bit ridiculous even to ask the [...]

1Nov1996 | | 2 comments | Continued

Rights, Freedom, and Rivalry

Dr. Baird is director of the Smith Center, California State University, Hayward, and this month’s guest editor. The idea for this paper came out of a conversation the author recently had with Dwight Lee of the University of Georgia (see pp. 663-666). A conversation with Dwight Lee is always fruitful. Packaging counts. This maxim of [...]

1Oct1996 | | 0 comments | Continued
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