If you did any Fed watching this week, you probably heard all about how Jay Powell has turned (or perhaps returned) to hawkishness, and how the Federal Open Market Committee is all about fighting price inflation now. A particularly cartoonish version of

In this week’s column, I’d like to discuss an important criticism of the modern state that the historian Martin van Creveld raises in his classic book The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge University Press, 1999). By “state,”  Van Creveld means

It may be that wary beasts of the forest come around to accepting the hunter's trap as a necessary concomitant of foraging for food. At any rate, the presumably rational human animal has become so inured to political interventions that

Philip Cortney (1895–1971) was a Franco-American entrepreneur, economist and business leader. Known nowadays mostly for his short chapter in Henry Hazlitt’s edited volume The Critics of Keynesian Economics (1960) and for having translated and introduced French economist Charles Rist’s book

Throughout much of the past century, the idea of a gold standard for national currencies has been routinely linked with laissez-faire economics and "classical liberalism"—also known as "libertarianism." It's not difficult to see why. During the second half of the

1. Purposeful Action and Animal Reaction Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego's meaningful response to stimuli and to

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When Ronald Reagan officially announced his candidacy for president of the United States in November 1979, he called for the establishment of a large free trade zone encompassing the USA, Canada, and Mexico. Not surprisingly, the so-called free trade agreement

[This article was originally published in Literature of Liberty.] I. Basic Causes of the Revolution The historian must be more than a chronicler, a mere lister of events. For his real task is discovering and setting forth the causal connections between events