Joseph Solis-Mullen | The Libertarian Institute

John Locke and the Two Streams of Liberalism

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Aug 28, 2025 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism

The Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment bequeathed to the Western world two basic springs of political thought. Both emerged from a common source: the rejection of divine-right monarchy, feudal hierarchy, and the suffocating weight of hereditary authority. Both, in their ways, extolled the dignity of the individual and the promise of human freedom. Yet from this same source, the waters quickly diverged. One stream ran toward the principles we now associate with classical liberalism: limited government, secure property rights, voluntary exchange, and the conviction that liberty...

Contra Colby

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Aug 21, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

So sick of liberal hegemony, critics of Washington’s foreign policy have long been apt to seize at anything that promises something, anything, different. Hence the vigorous applause directed towards anyone who doesn’t mindlessly embrace every single one of the blob’s wars. One of the most prominent in the second Donald Trump administration is Elbridge Colby, current Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, who has drawn the predictable beltway ire for reviews of Ukraine aid and AUKUS, among other things. But here’s the problem with Elbridge Colby, and everyone else like him, from the...

The Myth of European Plunder

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Aug 14, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Among a certain species of “critical” historian, it is an article of faith that Europe’s remarkable economic ascent was built not on its institutions, not on liberty, not on commerce, but on the systematic looting of the rest of the world. In this telling—descended from the anti-imperialist rhetoric of the 1960s New Left—Europe’s “miracle” was a simple matter of taking what didn’t belong to it, whether gold and silver from the Americas, spices from the Indies, or raw materials from Africa and Asia. This narrative has the advantage of being emotionally satisfying to those looking to discredit...

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...

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