Joseph Solis-Mullen | The Libertarian Institute

William F. Buckley (Properly) Remembered

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Aug 7, 2025 | Book Reviews, Featured Articles

To memorialize William F. Buckley Jr., as Sam Tanenhaus does in his recent biography and Charles King does in his review, is to celebrate the betrayal of the American conservative tradition. This betrayal was not incidental to Buckley’s career—it was its defining achievement. For all the ink spilled in celebration of Buckley’s wit, style, and institutional success, the substance of his legacy is unmistakable: he was the man most responsible for snuffing out the Old Right, and in its place erecting the managerial, warfare-welfare conservatism that still strangles American political life....

Conflicts, Deals, and Humanitarian Crises Across the Board

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Aug 1, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Across multiple conflict zones—from the mineral-rich hills of eastern Congo to the contested temple sites on the Thailand-Cambodia border—a familiar pattern emerges: foreign intervention complicates and often worsens already volatile situations. In recent years, American diplomatic efforts, especially under the Trump administration, have produced headline-grabbing agreements while sidestepping the structural causes of conflict. Whether through strategic alignments, economic opportunism, or misguided humanitarianism, Washington’s involvement has frequently undermined peace and sovereignty. A...

Industrial Capitalism and Its Critics

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jul 28, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, History

The nineteenth century marked the most dramatic leap forward in human welfare ever witnessed. It was a century defined not by aristocrats or emperors, but by coal, cotton, contracts, and capitalists. In his lectures “War, Peace, and the Industrial Revolution” and “The New World of Capitalism,” historian Ralph Raico masterfully outlined how capitalism, industrialization, and free trade shattered the stagnant feudal order and lifted hundreds of millions from abject poverty. Despite the predictable outcry from the old regime—the landed aristocracy, royal monopolists, and reactionary...

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...