Joseph Solis-Mullen | The Libertarian Institute

John Stuart Mill, An Enemy Disguised As a Friend

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jul 17, 2025 | Featured Articles

In The Struggle for Liberty, Ralph Raico—one of the twentieth century’s foremost libertarian historians—offers a sweeping and penetrating critique of John Stuart Mill. With clarity, historical depth, and a touch of well-placed fire, Raico demolishes the myth that Mill belongs in the pantheon of classical liberalism. Instead, Raico exposes Mill as a forerunner of the modern progressive state: one who stripped liberalism of its essential emphasis on economic freedom and opened the door to a new, coercive moralism enforced by government. This critique is more than academic—it goes to the heart...

‘New Deal Economics’ Gets Knocked Out Cold

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jul 10, 2025 | Book Reviews, Economics, Featured Articles

George Selgin’s False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, newly published by the University of Chicago Press, is a welcome contribution to the revisionist and post-revisionist literature on the legacy of the New Deal. While traditional historiographies of the period, which still predominate popular mainstream narratives, depict the New Deal as a story of triumphant state intervention saving capitalism from its own excesses, in reality the New Deal’s record has, for decades, been increasingly called into question by free-market scholars. Selgin’s work stands squarely in this...

Americans Must Oppose the Establishment of an East Asian NATO

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jul 3, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Ely Ratner’s latest offering in Foreign Affairs, “The Case for a Pacific Defense Pact,” is a textbook example of how groupthink, careerism, and militarist ideology continue to warp U.S. foreign policy discourse. Ratner, now back at the Marathon Initiative after a stint as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, proposes a new multilateral NATO-style alliance in the Pacific. This would be a grotesque escalation of already dangerous U.S. commitments in East Asia. From the perspective of anyone interested in realism, restraint, or constitutional government, this...

Want More Families? End Inflation

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jun 26, 2025 | Book Reviews, Economics, Featured Articles

In the recently published Inflation and the Family, Jason Degner delivers a compelling, accessible, and deeply necessary work—one that lays bare the real, grinding consequences of inflationary policies on everyday American families. For those concerned with economic policy and its social ramifications, Degner’s book is not just timely, but vital. For decades, Americans have been told that modest inflation is a sign of a healthy economy. Central bankers and mainstream economists have repeated the mantra that 2% annual inflation is a desirable target, something to be managed rather than...

A Nuclear Iran Isn’t America’s Problem

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jun 18, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

As the United States edges closer to another military entanglement—this time over the pretense of Iran’s nuclear program—it’s worth revisiting the controversial but deeply compelling argument made by the late Kenneth Waltz in his 2012 Foreign Affairs article, Why Iran Should Get the Bomb. At the time, Waltz’s thesis—that a nuclear Iran would bring greater regional stability, not less—was treated by many as academic heresy. But in the context of another round of Israeli airstrikes, and a steady drumbeat from Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment, his realism offers urgent...

Default Now!

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jun 12, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles

As of April 2025, the U.S. national debt stands at a staggering $36.2 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that net interest payments on this debt alone will reach $952 billion in fiscal year 2025—nearly a trillion dollars just to service past borrowing. Over the next decade, the debt is expected to rise by approximately $2 trillion per year, bringing the total to over $56 trillion by 2034. And still, there is no serious movement among America’s political class to stop the hemorrhaging. It is long past time to confront a fundamental truth: the United States must default...

A Timely Warning: Reassessing Ted Galen Carpenter’s America’s Coming War with China

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jun 5, 2025 | Book Reviews, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

When Libertarian Institute Senior Fellow Ted Galen Carpenter published America’s Coming War with China: A Collision Course Over Taiwan in 2005, it was met with polite attention and quiet dismissal by most of the foreign policy establishment, which at that time was focused on destruction and destabilization in the Middle East. Two decades later, his arguments read not as theoretical provocations but as tragic prophecies. The deepening crisis in U.S.-China relations, particularly as it relates to the increasingly volatile question of Taiwan, is unfolding precisely along the lines Carpenter...

A Libertarian Critique of the ‘Great, Big, Beautiful Bill’

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | May 26, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Politics

On May 22, 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed H.R. 1, the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a sprawling reconciliation package championed by President Donald Trump as “arguably the most significant piece of legislation” in American history. Clocking in at over eight-hundred pages, this behemoth combines tax cuts, spending increases, a debt ceiling hike, and sweeping policy changes—from border security to energy deregulation. Supporters hail it as a bold step toward economic revitalization and national sovereignty. But from a libertarian perspective, this bill is a...