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Lawrence W. Reed

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Business.jpg

Good Businesses Respond to Facts, Not Ads →

March 10, 2014

Which is better for business, a friendly overall environment with no special favors or an unfriendly environment offset by “incentives” for particular firms or certain activities?

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A Slogan Worth Your Bumper? →

February 7, 2014

Statism can be summed up and slapped on the back of a car. Can the freedom philosophy?

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Socrates and the Minimum Wage →

February 3, 2014

Whoever warned us to beware of Greeks bearing gifts apparently never met a congressman.

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Rules for Advancing Liberty →

December 30, 2013

The history of progress in ideas provides few examples of wrong-on-everything transforming into right-on-everything in a momentary leap. We must be patient, inviting, and understanding.

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Personal Character and the Political Environment →

August 21, 2013

You don’t check your character at the door when you go to work for the government. That means that the legal-political system is itself a reflection of the character of those who made the laws and those who are employed to carry them out.

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Special Laws for Special Friends →

April 29, 2013

How about just getting a few basics right, like protecting the peace and punishing wrongdoers, and stopping this business of creating special privileges aimed at a select few?

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Warnings from the Wise About the Welfare State →

March 21, 2013

If you declare at a party, "Guzzle with glee, you'll feel great!" but fail to say a word about tomorrow's hangover, in what subject are you an "expert"? You're not even tuned in to the long-run consequences of your own advice.

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The Little Red Hen Goes to Re-Education Camp →

March 19, 2013

I think the original Little Red Hen story was just fine the way it was. 

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Lincoln's Good Advice →

February 12, 2013

Whatever your assessment of his presidency might be, you will likely appreciate the sentiments he expressed in a long-forgotten letter he wrote to his stepbrother John D. Johnston on January 2, 1851.

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James A. Garfield: A Most Reluctant President →

February 8, 2013

If not for a bullet, the man who least wanted to be President may well have become widely known as one of our better ones. 

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Big Government = Bad Government: It Can't Be Otherwise

January 25, 2013

If you've supported the monstrous expansion of the federal government in recent decades, or if you've got a laundry list of things you want it to do because you think it's not yet big enough, then don't blow smoke about clean and honest politics. You're part of the problem.

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Remembering 1813 →

January 4, 2013

It turns out that 1813 was such a ho-hum year that triskaidekaphobians would have a tough time making a fuss of it.

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If Incentives Matter, We Might Be In Trouble →

October 3, 2012

The future world we are creating will surely be shaped by the incentives and disincentives we are putting in place today. 

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Cleveland Passed The Test of Character and Statesmanship →

June 27, 2012

Time and again he refused to do the politically expedient. For example, as a mayor, governor, and president, he rejected the spoils of victory and appointed the best people he could find—often earning the wrath of friends and party bigwigs because they didn’t get the nod.

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An Open Letter to Statists Everywhere →

April 26, 2012

Why is it that you statists never seem to learn anything about government? You see almost any shortcoming in the marketplace as a reason for government to get bigger, but you rarely see any shortcoming in government as a reason for it to get smaller.

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Where Are The Omelets? →

April 1, 2012

It is a telling conclusion that statists have no successful model to point to, no omelet they can hold up as the pièce de résistance of their cuisine. Not so for those of us who believe in freedom.

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Wanted: A Healthy Dose of Humility →

November 30, 2011

A message that humbles the high and mighty and pricks the inflated egos of those who think they know how to mind everybody else’s business. 

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Liberty and the Power of Ideas →

May 25, 2011

The outcome of the struggle between freedom and serfdom depends entirely on what percolates in the hearts and minds of men. At the present time the jury is still deliberating.

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Competition and Monopoly: A Refresher →

April 21, 2011

In economics, competition is not the antithesis of cooperation; rather, it is one of its highest and most beneficial forms. 

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Realignments to Remember →

October 26, 2010

Realignment elections demonstrate that Americans don’t much care for endless wars in faraway places, a sagging economy, spending and taxing binges, or politicians otherwise behaving badly.

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Recent “Best of Web”

Featured
Government Shutdown Exposed the Biggest Lie in Education
Oct 31, 2025
Government Shutdown Exposed the Biggest Lie in Education
Oct 31, 2025

“For decades, teachers unions and the liberal allies they bankroll in D.C. have told the American people that without the federal bureaucracy, education would crumble,” writes Ryan Walters.

Oct 31, 2025
Millions Gather to Express Total Ignorance
Oct 18, 2025
Millions Gather to Express Total Ignorance
Oct 18, 2025

“We're going to join our voices together and let the message ring loud and clear that we are uneducated rubes in desperate need of a middle-school social studies class,” said one man. Problem is, they DID have middle-school social studies, at great expense to the taxpayer, and still turned out to be rubes. Maybe there’s a connection??

Oct 18, 2025
Argentina's Economy Didn't Collapse; It Roared Back to Life
Sep 25, 2025
Argentina's Economy Didn't Collapse; It Roared Back to Life
Sep 25, 2025

Writes Dionysis Partsinevelos, “Experts warned that electing a chainsaw-wielding libertarian outsider as president would push the country over the edge. Instead, the unthinkable happened: Argentina’s economy started working again.”

Sep 25, 2025

Recent Quotes

Featured
Murphy on America
Feb 11, 2025
Murphy on America
Feb 11, 2025

“The true meaning of America, you ask? It’s in a Texas rodeo, in a policeman’s badge, in the sound of laughing children, in a political rally, in a newspaper. ... In all these things, and many more, you’ll find America. In all these things, you’ll find freedom. And freedom is what America means to the world. And to me” — Actor, poet, and the most decorated American of World War II, Audie Murphy.

Feb 11, 2025
Mill on Freedom
Feb 1, 2025
Mill on Freedom
Feb 1, 2025

“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”

Feb 1, 2025
Best-Selling Japanese Novelist Eiji Yoshikawa on Do-Gooders
Mar 20, 2023
Best-Selling Japanese Novelist Eiji Yoshikawa on Do-Gooders
Mar 20, 2023

“There’s nothing more frightening than a half-baked do-gooder who knows nothing of the world but takes it upon himself to tell the world what’s good for it — from his book, Musashi.

Mar 20, 2023

Recent Blogs

Featured
Montana's First Non-Indigenous Settlement
Nov 18, 2025
Montana's First Non-Indigenous Settlement
Nov 18, 2025

The St. Mary’s Mission and Museum in Stevensville is well worth your time when you’re in western Montana.

Nov 18, 2025
Dusting Off an Old but Important Story
Nov 13, 2025
Dusting Off an Old but Important Story
Nov 13, 2025

France was on the verge of national bankruptcy when the Revolution began in 1789. A rising chorus of panicked legislators called for printing paper money as a solution, but many people still remembered the ruin their ancestors suffered only 70 years before.

Nov 13, 2025
I (Identify As), Pencil
Nov 11, 2025
I (Identify As), Pencil
Nov 11, 2025

I was born a lawnmower but now I am a pencil. You can’t erase me, but I can erase you. Literally. So don’t offend me.

Nov 11, 2025