Fundamentals
Consumer Price Index (CPI): What It Measures and How to Interpret It
The CPI summarizes how prices change for a representative basket. Understanding its base period, weights, and limits helps prevent misleading readings.
Publication contributor
Articles by Daniel Sardá · Page 11
This archive contains published site articles attributed to Daniel Sardá. The separate Thinkers section contains historical intellectual profiles, not publication contributors.
Fundamentals
Equal Rights: What They Mean and What They Do Not Require
Equal rights protect every person's equal legal dignity. Understanding the principle requires separating equal rules, opportunity, equity, and outcomes.
Fundamentals
What Is the Function of Private Property?
Private property allocates decision-making powers, facilitates exchange, and protects spaces for autonomy, but it requires clear rules and responsibility toward others.
Fundamentals
The Entrepreneur in the Market: Function, Risk, and Responsibility
An entrepreneur is not defined simply by being wealthy, an owner, or a founder, but by making and revising decisions about resources in an uncertain future.
Fundamentals
State Discretion: What It Is and What Limits It
Public administration needs some room to respond to different cases. That room is legitimate only when it comes from law, rests on reasons, and remains open to review.
Fundamentals
Cancel Culture: What It Is and How It Differs From Censorship
Cancel culture covers very different practices, from withdrawing support to pressuring third parties to impose penalties. Distinguishing the actors, means, and consequences makes for a more rigorous assessment.
Fundamentals
Economic Cycles: What They Are, Phases, Causes, and Indicators
Economic cycles describe recurring expansions and contractions in economic activity, but they do not follow a fixed timetable or arise from a single cause.
Fundamentals
Tolerance and Truth: Living with Disagreement Without Giving Up Conviction
To tolerate does not mean to approve every idea or give up on truth. It means answering disagreement with reasons rather than coercion.
Fundamentals
Rural Property: What It Is and How It Differs from Urban Property
Rural property combines a right in real estate with a territorial classification that varies by country. Understanding it requires separating ownership, possession, and land use.
Fundamentals
Reasonable Pluralism: Living Together Without an Official Morality
Reasonable pluralism explains how people with incompatible convictions can support common political rules without giving up their own views of the good life.
Fundamentals
The Paradox of Tolerance: What Popper Meant
Unlimited tolerance can destroy the conditions that make tolerance possible. Popper's warning, however, is not a general license to censor.
Fundamentals
The Origins of Money: How It Emerged and What Problem It Solved
Money did not appear at one moment or through a single invention. It emerged from different practices that made exchange easier, more reliable, and more far-reaching.
Fundamentals
Freedom to Contract: What It Protects and Its Limits
Freedom to contract allows people to decide whether to enter a contract and with whom. It expresses individual autonomy, but requires valid consent, responsibility, and predictable legal rules.
Fundamentals
Conservative Liberalism: Meaning, Principles, and Differences
A guide to how conservative liberalism combines a defense of liberty and limited government with tradition, prudence, and gradual reform.
Fundamentals
Negative Rights: What They Are and How They Work
Negative rights require others to refrain from interfering with a protected sphere. This guide explains their logic, examples, and limits.
Fundamentals
Consent of the governed: what it means and what limits it
Political power does not become legitimate merely because it secures obedience. Consent of the governed requires that its origin, procedures, and limits be justified.
Fundamentals
What Is Limited Government and How Is Power Limited?
A limited government exercises power, but it cannot do so without boundaries: its powers, procedures, and effects on rights are subject to enforceable rules.
Fundamentals
Austrian Business Cycle Theory: Credit, Booms, and Readjustment
Austrian business cycle theory links credit expansion to investment signals that may prove incompatible with available saving and real resources.
Fundamentals
Political Centralization: Who Decides and Within What Limits?
Political centralization determines which level of government retains final authority. Understanding it requires attention to powers, territorial autonomy, and checks on power.
Fundamentals
Economic Rents: What They Are and Why They Are Not Just Any Profit
An economic rent is a payment above what is needed to keep a resource in its current use. This guide explains how to identify one without mistaking every income or profit for rent.
Fundamentals
Collective Property: What It Is and How It Works
Collective property assigns rights over an asset or resource to a defined group. How it works depends on who may use it, make decisions, exclude others, and demand accountability.
Fundamentals
Harm Principle: What It Is and Its Limits
The harm principle begins with a presumption of liberty: restricting a person requires showing a significant injury to others, not merely disapproval or a wish to protect them from themselves.
Fundamentals
What Is an Independent Judiciary and Why Does It Matter?
An independent judiciary decides according to the facts and the law, free from improper orders or pressure. Here are its safeguards, limits, and key distinctions.
Fundamentals
Voluntary Exchange and Liberty: Choice, Cooperation, and Limits
Free exchange lets people cooperate without imposing a shared purpose, but voluntariness requires more than formal assent: it requires capacity, information, and freedom from coercion.