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 ...

Nana Yaa Asantewaa was born in the 1840s as Asona royalty from the Besease clan in central Ghana and was of the Edweso stool line. Her brother was Kwasi Afrane and their parents were from the village ...

Anarchism is the philosophical opposition to authority — social, political, and economic — together with the correspondent belief that the state ought to be abolished, that is, that society could and ...

A discussion of the origins of the Great Depression is necessary to understand the mischaracterization of Hoover as a do- nothing president. First, the Great Depression was an exceptionally large ...

Then along came passionate, bold Mary Wollstonecraft who caused a sensation by writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). She declared that both women and men were human beings endowed with ...

Ronald Reagan is beloved by American conservatives and by many Americans who advocate for limited government. Reagan is difficult to evaluate because in the last 30 years Reagan’s legacy has undergone ...

In my last four essays, I discussed the ideas of Thomas Hodgskin. No discussion of Hodgskin would be complete without considering his great classic, The Natural and Artificial Right of Property ...

In November 1776, while a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, Thomas Jefferson was selected to head a committee charged with the task of revising the laws of Virginia, subject to approval by ...

Critiques of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, especially from conservatives and libertarians, generally center on his economic response to the Great Depression. This preoccupation is ...

In its long march toward full- spectrum dominance of American life, the American presidency has become both absurd and menacing. Our political culture has invested the office with preposterously vast ...