Dear Readers,

Another thirty essays on the Libertarian Alliance Blog since I last wrote – so many that I can’t bring myself to send notification. These range from medical critiques, to film reviews, to original articles on history and economics and law, to commentary on Britain’s continued slide into a freakish police state. You can find it all here: https://libertarianism.uk/

But I will bring these new books to your attention. They are interesting and timely in themselves, and they would make nice Christmas presents.

Thank you, as always, for your support of Free Life and the Libertarian Alliance.

Sean Gabb
Director Emeritus
The Libertarian Alliance

What appears at first to be a technical dispute over tariffs turns out, on closer inspection, to be something much deeper: an argument about the foundations of liberty itself.

Trading for Freedom brings together a sustained intra-libertarian debate that began with disagreements over trade policy and developed into a searching examination of rights, power, morality, and political strategy. The contributors ask whether libertarianism should be understood primarily as a doctrine of inviolable rights and voluntary exchange, or as a contingent programme for recovering a freer civilisation under conditions increasingly hostile to liberty.

The volume centres on an extended exchange between Duncan Whitmore and Bryan Mercadente on the status of free trade, tariffs, and protection. Whitmore defends the orthodox libertarian position that trade is simply voluntary cooperation between individuals, and that coercion cannot be made virtuous by good intentions. Mercadente accepts the abstract economic case for free trade, but questions whether economic theory alone can dictate policy in a world shaped by entrenched power, distorted institutions, and deliberate deindustrialisation.

As the debate unfolds, it moves beyond economics into first principles. Questions of natural rights, political authority, justice, and moral obligation are brought to the surface through a philosophical “examination” set by Neil Lock, and answered from sharply contrasting perspectives by Mercadente and Sebastian Wang. Stephan Kinsella’s intervention further sharpens the dispute over whether rights are grounded in human nature, social convention, or something else entirely.
Edited with a substantial Introduction by Reginald Godwyn, Trading for Freedom provides both a chronological map of the debate and a thematic assessment of its underlying tensions. It shows how disagreements over trade policy quickly become disagreements about anthropology, morality, and the limits of economics as a foundation for liberty.

This is not a manifesto, nor a settled doctrine. It is a serious internal reckoning within libertarian thought—one that will interest readers concerned with political economy, philosophy, and the conditions under which freedom can survive contact with organised power.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0G7JNG4S9 

Edited and shaped by Sebastian Wang, with an Introduction by Sean Gabb and a Foreword by Stephan Kinsella, this volume brings together the most thought-provoking papers and discussions from the conference. The contributors do not offer a party line. They argue with each other as much as with the modern managerial state. What unites them is a shared belief that private property, free exchange and voluntary association are the only secure foundations of a civilised order.

Across historical case-studies, theoretical essays and hard-headed policy talks, the book explores how genuine liberty can survive under systems that are democratic in name yet bureaucratic and coercive in practice. The result is a snapshot of dissident liberal thought at a time of war scares, inflation, surveillance and cultural fragmentation.

Inside this volume, you will find:

· Clear, non-technical defences of private property and contract in an age of central banking and regulation.
· Analyses of war, sanctions and great-power rivalry from an anti-imperial yet pro-Western perspective.
· Essays on culture, education, religion and the family, and their role in sustaining or undermining a free society.
· Discussions of secession, decentralisation and parallel institutions as realistic strategies of resistance.
· Historical reflections on earlier empires and revolutions – and what they can teach us about today’s crises.

Whether you are a long-standing reader of Hoppe, Rothbard and Kinsella, or are simply looking for serious arguments against the expanding power of the modern state, Freedom Under the Sun offers a rare thing: honest, unfiltered debate among people who still take ideas seriously.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Freedom-Under-Sun-Proceedings-Property/dp/B0G4D69HDR/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.H3qEEEiS1iCTYhclLYbn_g.Wi7cWuG3UC2tmH4MvyWU0YF6aDFl_oEh2Ce2ojhQZI4&qid=1765920127&sr=1-1