Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism

The abysmal 2008 presidential election should have Americans scratching their heads, pondering how the political economy of the United States devolved into a duopoly of two nearly identical, state-loving political parties that are always ready to intervene militarily anywhere on the planet.
It was not always this way, and how we got here is the focus [...]

A Property-Rights Theory of Mass Murder

Stephen Carson, a software engineer, writes independently from St. Louis. This article is condensed from “Killing and Stealing: A Property-Rights Theory of Mass Murder,” which first appeared in The Independent Review, Winter 2007, and was reprinted in Opposing the Crusader State: Alternatives to Global Interventionism, edited by Robert Higgs and Carl P. Close (The Independent [...]

The Peace Principle

The key principle of liberalism is peace. Some would say peaceful cooperation is the key. But in a free society one is also free peacefully not to cooperate. 
Many would say the core principle of liberalism is freedom, and since the word liberalism is derived from the Latin liber, which means free, that is a reasonable [...]

Book Reviews – August 2006

• Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WW II Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan
  by A. C. Grayling
  Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling

• How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution
  
  by Richard A. Epstein Reviewed
  by George C. Leef

• Saving Our Environment from Washington

  by David Schoenbrod Reviewed by Jane S. Shaw

• The Quotable Mises

  Edited by Mark Thornton Reviewed by William H. Peterson

On Misplaced Concreteness in Social Theory

Joseph Stromberg (jrstromberg@charter.net) is a historian and freelance writer.
The following piece will not be as abstruse as its title suggests. Rather, it results from the simple observation that, time and time again, some harmful outcome or process commonly attributed to the everyday workings of the market economy actually does exist, but it exists in the [...]

Book Reviews – April 2004

America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire
by Claes G. Ryn
Transaction Publishers • 2003 • 221 pages • $34.95
Reviewed by Richard Ebeling
In 1988 Robert Nisbet, one of America’s most prominent sociologists and conservative social philosophers, published The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America. He critically evaluated how American society [...]

The Pentagon Ramps Up the War on Privacy

David Brown is a freelance writer and editor. This is the first of two parts.
[Editor's Note: As we went to press the U.S. Congress had hampered the Defense Department's ability to carry out the threat to privacy discussed in the following article.  Under the provision adopted the Pentagon cannot proceed until it assesses for Congress [...]

Postconstitutional America?

It’s a cliché that in time of war we must shift the balance between liberty and security, sacrificing some freedom to protect our society from assault. Funny how we blithely forget other fond adages when they become unfashionable, such as Benjamin Franklin’s famous warning about trading freedom for security.
It is more important than ever that [...]

Mere Isolationism: The Foreign Policy of the Old Right

Joseph Stromberg is a part-time college lecturer in history.
One of the “lost causes” to which libertarians are attached—and one of the most important—is that of the “isolationist” Old Right. As used by the late Murray Rothbard, among others, the term “Old Right” refers to a loose coalition opposed to the New Deal in both its [...]