Alan Mosley | The Libertarian Institute

WMDs for a MIC in Need

by Alan Mosley | Dec 18, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

In the closing days of 2025, the White House turned an opioid crisis into a national security drama. Standing in the Oval Office during a Mexican Border Defense Medal ceremony on December 15, President Donald Trump declared that he would sign an executive order to classify fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction,” calling the announcement “historic.” Treating a synthetic painkiller like a nuclear bomb says more about Washington’s mindset than about the drug. Though drug overdose deaths declined in 2024, 80,391 people still died and 54,743 of those deaths were from opioids. Those numbers...

Rose Wilder Lane, Frontier Prophet of Freedom

by Alan Mosley | Dec 11, 2025 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism

On December 5, 1886, on a windswept homestead near De Smet in Dakota Territory, Rose Wilder Lane entered a world of adversity. She was the only surviving child of Laura Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder. Within a few short years her family’s cabin burned, her parents were stricken with diphtheria, her father suffered a crippling stroke, and severe winters forced them to leave the prairie. Those early calamities impressed on Lane two lessons that would define her life: that individual fortitude matters more than fate, and that no external authority can substitute for self‑discipline. When she left...

Death Orders on the High Seas: Confronting Executive Violence and Constitutional Limits

by Alan Mosley | Dec 4, 2025 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

When journalism reveals a government’s dirty deeds, a country founded on constitutional constraints faces a stark test. Reports allege that a senior U.S. official ordered Special Operations commanders to “kill everybody” on a suspected Venezuelan drug boat in September, and after the first missile strike disabled the vessel, survivors clung to the shattered hull and were finished off by a follow‑on strike. Senators on both sides of the aisle have called for investigations, and former military lawyers have warned that the instructions amount to war crimes or outright murder. Critics from...

Henry Hazlitt, ‘Economic Conscience of a Nation’

by Alan Mosley | Nov 26, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Libertarianism

Henry Hazlitt’s life story reads like a microcosm of the American century. Born in Philadelphia on November 28, 1894, he lost his father in infancy and left the City College of New York to support his widowed mother. In the fluid labor market of the time he bounced between office jobs, learning shorthand to improve his wages and eventually landing at The Wall Street Journal. Along the way he schooled himself by voracious reading. Philip Wicksteed’s The Common Sense of Political Economy convinced him that prices are determined by subjective preferences, while the essays of Herbert Spencer, B....

Robert Nozick, From Socialist Youth to Libertarian Visionary

by Alan Mosley | Nov 17, 2025 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism

Born on November 16, 1938 in Brooklyn, Robert Nozick began his intellectual life as a young socialist but ended it as one of the twentieth century’s fiercest defenders of property rights and limited government. Raised in a Jewish immigrant household, he joined Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party youth wing and helped organize the Student League for Industrial Democracy, yet his curiosity soon led him beyond doctrinaire leftism. While studying at Columbia and later Princeton, he encountered thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and Ayn Rand, whose...

Dick Cheney, War Criminal and Torturer, Dead at 84

by Alan Mosley | Nov 4, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Former U.S. Vice President Richard “Dick” Cheney died on November 3, 2025 at age 84; his family said he had suffered from pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease. Best known for steering national security policy after the 9/11 attacks, he became the dominant force behind a Global War on Terror that unleashed torture, preemptive war, and mass surveillance. Amnesty International has described him as one of the principal architects of a program that amounted to torture, while the Brown University Costs of War project attributes more than 900,000 deaths and trillions of dollars in spending to...

Ralph Raico, Historian of Liberty and Revisionist of War

by Alan Mosley | Oct 30, 2025 | Featured Articles, History

Ralph Raico was an American historian and libertarian public intellectual who devoted his life to recovering the liberal tradition and exposing the predatory nature of state power. Teaching European history at Buffalo State College and serving as a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, he specialized in the history of liberty, the liberal tradition in Europe, and the relation between war and the rise of the state. Raico combined classical erudition with polemical sharpness. He insisted that a genuine liberalism is rooted in private property and voluntary exchange, that society can...

Albert Jay Nock, Radical Individualism, and the Remnant

by Alan Mosley | Oct 13, 2025 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism

Albert Jay Nock’s life spanned the transformation of the United States from the laissez‑faire America of the late nineteenth century to the managerial state of the New Deal. Born on October 13, 1870 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Nock studied Greek and Latin in the classical curriculum at St. Stephen’s College. He was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1897, but church life proved too confining; within a few years he left the pulpit to write for American Magazine and to edit The Nation. In 1920 he and bookseller B. W. Huebsch launched The Freeman, a weekly that presented essays by radicals and...

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