Fundamentals
Credit Crunch: What It Is, How It Happens, and Its Effects
A credit crunch restricts access to borrowing or makes its terms more stringent. Understanding one requires looking beyond the total volume of credit.
Archive
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Chronological archive of Libertatis Venezuela publications. Here you can review every published article without filtering by category.
Fundamentals
Minority Protection: Equal Rights, Identity, and Limits on Power
Protecting minorities requires equal rights, effective freedoms, and limits on power—without turning collective identity into an imposition.
Fundamentals
Risk Premium: What It Is, How to Calculate It, and How to Interpret It
A risk premium compares the yield on one debt instrument with a benchmark. This guide explains its calculation, its drivers, and how to read it without jumping to conclusions.
Fundamentals
Oligopoly: What It Is, How It Works, and How It Differs From a Monopoly
An oligopoly is a market in which a small number of significant firms make decisions while anticipating how their rivals may respond.
Fundamentals
Sound Money: What It Means and Why It Matters
Sound money aims to preserve money's usefulness through credible rules, predictability, and limits on arbitrary change.
Fundamentals
Freedom to Work: Meaning, Scope, and Limits
Freedom to work protects the ability to choose, accept, change, or leave a lawful occupation without coercion or arbitrary barriers.
Fundamentals
Social liberalism: individual freedom, opportunity, and limits on power
Social liberalism seeks to combine civil liberties and a market economy with institutions that expand people’s real opportunities.
Fundamentals
Liberalism vs. Conservatism: Differences and Common Ground
A guide to what distinguishes liberalism from conservatism, where they overlap, and why principles matter more than labels.
Fundamentals
State Impartiality: What It Means and Why It Limits Power
State impartiality requires public authorities to decide on relevant criteria and reviewable reasons, free from favoritism, prejudice, and private interests.
Fundamentals
Rule of Law: A Simple Explanation
A clear introduction to the rule of law, its basic principles, and the signs that reveal whether it works in practice.
Fundamentals
What Is the Private Sphere and Why Does It Matter?
The private sphere is the domain in which a person can make decisions, form relationships, and control access to personal information without being exposed by default.
Fundamentals
Civilized Disagreement: Living Together Without Thinking Alike
Disagreeing civilly does not mean staying silent, yielding, or approving someone else's ideas. It means sustaining conflict through reasons, rights, and shared rules.
Fundamentals
Civil and Political Rights: Liberty, Participation, and Limits on Power
Civil rights protect liberty and legal security; political rights let people take part in shaping and holding power accountable. The distinction is useful, though the two categories reinforce one another in practice.
Fundamentals
Right of Enjoyment: What It Is and How It Differs from Ownership
A right of enjoyment can let someone benefit from an asset without holding every power of an owner. Its scope depends on the instrument that creates it and the law that applies.
Fundamentals
Executive Branch Checks: What They Are and How They Limit Power
Checks on the executive branch make it possible to demand explanations, review legality, audit public spending, and hold officials accountable without preventing government from carrying out its functions.
Fundamentals
Individual Consent: When Is a Yes Truly Valid?
Consent is not a mere formality: it is a free, attributable decision about a specific action. Its validity depends on context.
Fundamentals
Central Banking and Venezuela: The BCV’s Functions and Limits
The BCV offers a concrete way to understand what a central bank can do, what it cannot control on its own, and why rules and accountability matter.
Fundamentals
Legality: What It Means and Why It Limits Power
Legality requires public authority to act on a legal basis, within its powers, and through procedures open to review.
Fundamentals
Interest Rate: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters
An interest rate relates an amount of money to a period of time. Learn how to read it in loans and savings without confusing it with the total cost or return.
Fundamentals
Popular Sovereignty: What It Is, How It Is Exercised, and Its Limits
Popular sovereignty locates the legitimate source of political power in the people. Understanding it requires distinguishing who is sovereign, how that sovereignty is exercised, and which limits protect everyone’s freedom.
Fundamentals
Protectionism: What It Is, How It Works, and Its Effects
Protectionism covers measures that favor selected domestic producers over imported competition. Understanding it requires examining its tools, its distributional effects, and the conditions for any exceptions.
Fundamentals
Limited Political Power: What It Is and How It Protects Freedom
Limited political power is public authority subject to purposes, powers, procedures, rights, and checks that can be verified. It does not mean only short terms of office or a minimal state.
Fundamentals
Political Obedience: Reasons, Legitimacy, and Limits
Following a rule may be prudent, legally required, or morally owed. Understanding political obedience means separating those reasons and examining the limits of power.
Fundamentals
Market and Knowledge: How Prices Coordinate Dispersed Information
Markets help coordinate decisions made with distinct, partial knowledge. Prices and competition help discover, communicate, and correct information without requiring any single authority to know everything.