What’s the big-picture lesson here? Montesquieu, the French Enlightenment thinker, summed it up in 1748: “Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.”

Long before the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek noted that “The more the State plans, the more difficult planning becomes for the individual,” Coolidge knew it in his gut.

So many black, blind and brilliant musicians grace our history that it’s difficult to fit them in a single list.

The notion that only government can “make money” is not only historically inaccurate, it’s also downright silly.

I have no interest in homogenizing people in a socialist or egalitarian blender. Commonism is just one letter away from communism, a deadly poison.

Without men and women willing to dream and take risks, life for the masses would surely still be—in the words of Thomas Hobbes—nasty, brutish and short, just as it was for centuries until capitalism gave the entrepreneur a chance to succeed.

If the choice is obedience or conscience, I try my best to pick conscience.

Smart people are skeptical of the expansion of government power, because they know history, economics and human nature. They don’t allow such politicians to buy them off with other people’s money.

The uncommonly courageous few will rise far sooner than the timid multitudes, and it is to them that all of us who love freedom owe special gratitude.

A violent enemy of private property now wastes his last days in a small corner of public property. What a Marxist moron! Oops, sorry, that’s redundant.

We can certainly understand why New Yorkers right about now might appreciate something Henry David Thoreau once said: “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”

One of my favorite people and a personal friend, Steve Forbes, interviews me on Jesus and economics.

While your “progressive” history professor was telling you how idealistic, reform-minded, forward-thinking and “for the people” Woodrow Wilson supposedly was, did he or she tell you about the courageous Hutterites who stood up to his heavy-handedness?

Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan celebrate the 200th episode of their FEE program, “Words & Numbers”, and I was very proud to be a part of the special occasion.

In the eight years of his presidency (1801-1809), did he practice what he preached? To a remarkable extent, yes he did.

Sebastian Stodolak of the Warsaw Enterprise Institute interviews me (November 2020) on my 1986 visit with the Polish anti-communist underground, Robert Higgs’ “ratchet effect”, the future of freedom and other topics.

Pursuing truth for its own sake and mustering the courage to speak it without equivocation should be the loftiest of objectives in any profession. They fit the life and career of Walter Williams perfectly.

Then there are the Samuel Kleins of the world—the truly uncommon marvels who overcome the unimaginable to become the unexpected. They are heroes, builders, creators of wealth, and servants to the millions whose lives they improve

If you want to know what produces a healthy, growing economy, think back to what motivates the individuals who comprise it. Encouragement looms large at every level.

By relieving individuals of challenges, which then deprives them of purpose, the welfare state is an unnatural and anti-social contrivance.