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The National System of Political Economy

A German historian who wrote in favor of protective tariffs and trade retaliations between industrial nations, even if they maintain free trade within each country. During the 1820s, he lived in Pennsylvania, where he contributed to the pro-tariff debates in the United States. His economic arguments were centered around refutations of Adam Smith.

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A Policy of Free Exchange

The companion volume to A Plea for Liberty which continued the argument against the Fabian Socialists and for a policy of strict non-intervention in the economy by the government.

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The Law of Intellectual Property (1855)

Although this is entitled volume 1 and a proposed list of contents for a volume 2 was appended to the work, no volume 2 ever appeared. Spooner takes a strong position on the perpetual property right of an author to his ideas in perpetuity with no government defined limit. The opening chapter has an interesting defence of property rights in general.

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Political Institutions, being Part V of the Principles of Sociology

This is part of Spencer’s most extensive treatment of sociology, The Principles of Sociology. It is the section dealing with the nature of political institutions such as political heads like chiefs and kings, consultative bodies, the military, and the judiciary. It also contains his most important discussion of the difference between the militant and the industrial types of societies.

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A Letter to Thomas Bayard (1882)

A letter which first appeared in Benjamin Tucker’s journal Liberty in 1882. Bayard was a Democratic Senator from the state of Delaware who believed that enlightened people like himself were the fittest to govern in the US. Spooner rejected this idea.

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The Present Age

Nisbet examines the role of the United States in the world since World War I focusing on the threats that the unprecedented militarization of American life in the decades after 1914, bureaucracy, centralization, and creeping conformity pose to liberty and individual independence in the western world.

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