Fundamentals
Limited Government and Individual Rights: Why Power Needs Boundaries
Individual rights are not concessions from those in power: they are limits that require public coercion to be justified, reviewable, and restrained.
Publication contributor
Articles by Daniel Sardá · Page 3
This archive contains published site articles attributed to Daniel Sardá. The separate Thinkers section contains historical intellectual profiles, not publication contributors.
Fundamentals
Moral Pluralism: What It Is, What It Does Not Mean, and How to Think About Value Conflicts
Moral pluralism holds that genuine values can conflict without always being reducible to a single rule. It does not mean that anything goes.
Fundamentals
Limits on Coercion: When Public Power May Restrict Freedom
Restricting conduct may be necessary, but the mere existence of a law does not by itself justify the use of public force.
Fundamentals
Inflation and the Rule of Law: Why Predictability Matters
The connection between inflation and the rule of law is not that good laws eliminate price increases. It is that a predictable currency and public rules help people save, make contracts, and plan.
Fundamentals
Disinflation: What It Is and Why It Does Not Mean Lower Prices
Lower inflation does not automatically mean prices return to their earlier level. Disinflation describes a slower increase in the general price level.
Fundamentals
Retroactivity of the Law: What It Is and When It Reaches the Past
A new law can govern the future without necessarily rewriting the past. The difference turns on the fact, right, or effect it seeks to regulate.
Fundamentals
Business Ownership: What It Is, Who Controls a Company, and Why It Matters
Business ownership organizes rights over capital and its returns, but it does not by itself determine who makes day-to-day decisions or how each owner is liable.
Fundamentals
Civil Power: What It Is, How It Differs, and Why It Needs Limits
Civil power usually refers to public authority outside the military, but the term changes with the context. Its political value also depends on its limits.
Fundamentals
Liberal Parliamentarism: What It Is, How It Works, and the Limits It Needs
Parliamentarism organizes the relationship between parliament and government; its liberal character depends on rights, legality, and limits on power.
Fundamentals
Freedom of Belief: What It Protects, Key Differences, and Limits
Freedom of belief grants neither unlimited privileges nor demands religious silence: it protects personal conviction and pluralism governed by equal rights.
Fundamentals
Liberalism and Religious Freedom: What a Liberal State Protects
A liberal state does not decide which faith deserves greater respect: it protects the conscience of believers and nonbelievers alike and limits coercion over its expression.
Fundamentals
Liberalism and Voluntary Cooperation: Freedom, Agreements, and Social Life
Voluntary cooperation lets people coordinate different projects through exchange, association, and common rules, without demanding unanimity or confusing freedom with an absence of responsibility.
Fundamentals
Personal Inviolability: What It Protects and Why It Limits Power
A principle that requires treating every person as an end in themselves, distinct from specific rights such as integrity, privacy, or personal liberty.
Fundamentals
Intimacy and Liberty: Why a Private Sphere Protects Individual Autonomy
Intimacy is neither permission to harm nor a demand for others’ silence: it is the reserve that lets people decide, reconsider, and sustain relationships without undue surveillance or coercion.
Fundamentals
Division of Labor: What It Is, How It Raises Productivity, and What It Needs to Coordinate
The division of labor concentrates tasks and knowledge, but it also creates interdependence: to work, it requires exchange and coordination.
Fundamentals
Possession: What It Is and How It Differs from Ownership
Possession concerns a person’s effective relationship with an asset; ownership concerns legal title. Telling them apart helps explain custody, possessory protection, and acquisitive prescription.
Fundamentals
What Is a Central Bank and What Does It Do?
A central bank manages the basic forms of money and exercises the powers assigned to it by law. Its decisions matter for payments and financial conditions, but cannot replace production, fiscal discipline, or credible rules.
Fundamentals
Economic Privileges: What They Are and How They Affect Competition
An economic privilege does not describe every advantage or inequality. It identifies an advantage protected by selective treatment, exclusivity, or a rule that does not apply equally.
Fundamentals
Market and Scarcity: How Prices Coordinate Limited Resources
Scarcity makes choice unavoidable. Markets and prices help coordinate those choices, though they do not remove the limits on resources.
Fundamentals
Constitutional Review: What It Is, Its Types, and Why It Limits Power
Constitutional review measures laws and public decisions against the Constitution. Its models, effects, and limits matter as much as its existence.
Fundamentals
Subjective Value: What It Is and How It Relates to Prices
Subjective value explains why the same good can matter differently to different people and at different times, without confusing a valuation with a price.
Fundamentals
Real Interest Rate: What It Measures, How to Calculate It, and Why It Matters
The real interest rate shows what happens to the purchasing power of savings or debt after inflation is taken into account.
Fundamentals
State Ownership: What It Is and How to Tell It Apart
State ownership identifies who owns or controls an asset. By itself, it does not tell us who uses or manages it, how it is funded, or what results it produces.
Fundamentals
Personal Liberty: What It Is, What It Protects, and Its Limits
Personal liberty protects a sphere of decision-making and, in its strict legal sense, physical integrity against arbitrary deprivation of liberty.