Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff

We should always be skeptical of too much concentrated power in the hands of government agents. They will naturally abuse it.

Don’t start a fight, but always be prepared, if absolutely necessary, to finish a fight unjustly instigated by someone else.

“What is prudence in the conduct of every private family,” Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations, “can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.” Under the old rules, says Buchanan, “government should not place future generations in bondage by deficit financing of public outlays designed to provide temporary and short-lived benefits.” But all that changed with the publication of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

Adam Smith, the Scottish moral philosopher widely considered the father of modern economics, based his economic thinking on the mutually beneficial gains achieved from voluntary cooperation. But cooperation and exchange are based on mutually understood values. His most important work, a foundation for all classical liberal thinking, is The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I