Did Adam Smith—celebrated hero of free trade—make a big exception for reasons of national defense? Would he support the Jones ...

Caleb Petitt is a Research Associate for the Independent Institute, where he researches historical political economy, history of economic thought, and trade. He holds a PhD in economics from George ...

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 ...

David T. Beito is professor emeritus of history at the University of Alabama and a senior research fellow at the Independent Institute. He is the author of several books and scholarly articles, ...

By 2019, after a parade of leaders emblematizing God knows what, things had changed a great deal. With The Conservative Sensibility, Will presents a book “written at a moment when conservatism is ...

Eminent domain refers to the legal power of a government or a private entity to which government has delegated this power to forcibly take private property from its owners.Under American law, the ...

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 ...