It should be no surprise that nearly 40 percent of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 were of Scottish blood. (Photo: The National William Wallace Monument in Stirling, Scotland.)

A lackluster one-termer, it’s hard to claim he made much of a lasting difference, but here’s some trivia anyway.

Let’s celebrate July 24 as the day that Parliament gave back to the people the light and air it should never have taken in the first place. I believe God wants it that way.

That’s a live raccoon on my shoulder in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2017. It has nothing to do with the subject of this interview. but hopefully it will get you to watch it—the interview, that is.

Ed Feulner will always be a giant in the liberty movement he devoted himself to building. For that, every liberty-loving individual on the planet should be grateful—now and for all time.

The state is the God of the socialist religion, so whether socialists are evil or stupid is always a flip of a coin. Javier Milei is undoing their damage in Argentina.

What if a President were to announce one day, “I hereby pardon everybody in America for every offense they committed and for every offense they might yet commit.” Would anyone in his right mind believe that this would be in keeping with either the spirit or the letter of the Constitution? Hey, whose hand is that on the autopen? (Photo credit: NewsMobile.in.)

You’ve got to love the spirit John Robertson Duigan shared with Wilbur and Orville Wright—fly first, then get government approval. Photo credit: Duigan’s 1910 biplane, from Reddit.

The internment of almost 120,000 Japanese Americans in the wake of Pearl Harbor remains one of the blackest marks against the Roosevelt administration. Montana Senator Mike Mansfield opposed it.

Left-leaning idiots in the West embraced China’s one-child policy as a bright idea. Photo credit: Lawrence W. Reed, Beijing, 2004. This article also appears at The Stream: https://stream.org/the-ultimate-big-government-dictating-how-many-children-you-have/.

Financier, entrepreneur, patriot, and legislator, James Swan spent a quarter of his life in custody over a minor dispute. (Photo credit: portrait of Swan by Gilbert Stuart in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.)

America’s Founders understood that, as Tacitus put it, “Lust of absolute power is more burning than all the passions.” They knew that free societies are rare in human history — in part because, as Sallust lamented, “Only a few prefer liberty; the majority seek nothing more than fair masters.”

Nothing that ever happened on the 4th of July eclipses America’s founding in either importance or impact.

If you’re curious what an absolute dictatorship looks like—one of the very worst in all history—this is a story you’ll want to read. The power-driven wickedness of Wang Mang.

The fact that free people are not equal economically is actually a cause for rejoicing. Economic inequality, when it stems from the freedom of creative individuals and not from political power, testifies to the fact that people are being themselves, each putting his uniqueness to work in ways that are fulfilling to himself and of value to others.

"When he hit a brick wall, he didn’t retreat to his sitting room; instead, he created opposing and influential institutions. He saw liberty as God’s intention for humanity and would not abide the presumptuous claims of earthly governments to diminish it for our own good. This was a man confidently, persuasively, and fearlessly principled" -- John Hendrickson and Lawrence Reed at Iowans for Tax Relief. For more on Machen, see also “God’s Forgotten Libertarian” at https://tinyurl.com/525hjj6c

James A. Garfield was a good man who likely would have gone down in history as a great president had he lived. Garfield County, Montana, can be very proud of its name.

Photo: With Raghavendar (Ravi) Askani in Atlanta on June 10, 2025, celebrating the translation of “I, Pencil” into Telugu. An estimated 96 million people, mostly in central and southeastern India, speak the language. Leonard Read would be very proud. Ravi is co-founder with Venkatesh Geriti of the Swatantrata Center, publisher of this edition.

FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s was not a carbon copy of Wang Anshi’s New Policies of the 1070s, of course, but they share an activist, centralizing tendency noted by FDR's own Vice President and Agriculture Secretary. Pictured: sketch of Song Dynasty hydraulic grain mill (Wikimedia). Spanish version here: https://informeorwell.com/opinion/las-similitudes-del-new-deal-de-roosevelt-en-1933-y-el-fracasado-programa-economico-chino-de-la-dinastia-song/

What the barbarians did to Rome, hoodlums on a smaller scale did to Minneapolis, New York, Portland, and Chicago in 2020, but for this significant difference: The ones who assaulted Rome were foreigners.