This episode goes into the sixth chapter of the eleventh book — the most quoted passage of political writing produced in the eighteenth century, and among the least accurately remembered. Read to the halfway mark it says what everyone thinks it says: three powers, three sets of hands, keep them apart. Read past that point and Montesquieu dismantles both prohibitions. He does not want a permanent judiciary at all. He wants occasional tribunals of ordinary men, assembled for th

Two men were born in Scotland in 1723, a county apart. They joined the same Edinburgh club, kept the same friends, and worked from the same premise about what commercial life does to a people. They never agreed about the remedy, and the disagreement is more specific and more difficult than it is usually made to sound.

Episode 12 of Self-Evident opens Arc Four and the Scottish arc. It begins with the conditions: a kingdom that lost Darien and then argued itself into a union it did not agree about, a Kirk that put a schoolmaster in nearly every lowland parish because Presbyterian doctrine required ordinary people to read Scripture themselves, and that in the same generation urged the vigorous execution of the law against a twenty-year-old student named Thomas Aikenhead, hanged for blasphemy

Five lessons from Bastiat, building from his most famous idea to his most profound: why the state produces nothing of its own, the satirical petition that destroyed protectionism with a joke about the sun, what happens when plunder writes itself into law, the seen and the unseen, and finally The Law — the 1850 essay that is the foundation this entire channel stands on.