Saying people have a right to health care is based on a conceptual confusion. — By Trevor Burrus Is there a right to health care? Most libertarians and classical liberals would say “no,” and most progressives are shocked by that answer. For progressives, nothing could be more obvious than that everyone deserves access to health care regardless of their ability to pay. Distributing medical care…

Not this again. — By Sarah Skwire Vice President Mike Pence won’t meet alone with women. Meanwhile, guys like Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein won’t keep their hands off them. 2017 is the year of the strict binary. Women’s roles are no exception. Pence’s camp would have women kept in some sort of professional…

Economist Peter Van Doren joins Aaron and Trevor for a conversation about Richard Thaler’s work in behavioral economics. — Subscribe to Free Thoughts What’s the difference between behavioral economics and more traditional neoclassical economics? Is the goal of behavioral economics really to implement consumer preferences? …

eBook downloads of original titles in philosophy, history, and economics. —

A short essay on the basics of libertarianism. — By David Boaz Libertarianism is the philosophy of freedom. It’s not easy to define freedom. The author Leonard Read said, “Freedom is the absence of man-concocted restraints against the release of creative energy.” The Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek referred to “a state in which each can use his knowledge…

Smith explains how Spooner reconciled his theory of nonvoting with his view that the Constitution is antislavery, and how he treated discussions of slavery during the Constitutional Convention. — By George H. Smith After making some preliminary remarks in previous essays about Lysander Spooner’s The Unconstitutionality Slavery (published in two parts, 1845 and 1847), I abruptly switched to some discussions of slavery during the Constitutional Convention. I did this for a reason. I wanted to illustrate the difficult hurdle…

A look at Spooner’s defense of the right to use violence in self-defense, even against agents of a government. — By George H. Smith In Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (1973), one of the best books on abolitionism ever written, Lewis Perry said that Lysander Spooner “was the leading authority for the view that slavery was illegal under the Constitution.” Although “he was greatly…

An exploration of the features of Spooner’s philosophy of law, as found in The Unconstitutionality of Slavery. — by George H. Smith It may seem that The Unconstitutionality of Slavery contains little of interest to libertarian readers, apart from the significant historical role it played in the abolitionist campaign to abolish slavery. I have known many libertarians who admire Spooner and have read his better-known tracts, such as…

Libertarianism ought to be appealing to black Americans, who have suffered greatly at the hands of the United States government. So why isn’t it more popular? — by Jonathan Blanks This essay originally appeared on Libertarianism.org. Throughout the history of the United States, government at all levels has been an oppressive force on people of color, especially black people. The republic was founded with African chattel slavery implicitly recognized in the Constitution. After Reconstruction, state and local…