The Forgotten Man, and Other Essays

The forgotten man is neither the pauper nor the millionaire. He is the ordinary citizen who goes about his business, pays his taxes, and watches as politicians and special interests conspire to spend his money on schemes that benefit anyone but him. This is the provocateur who coined that phrase, and these essays reveal why his voice still cuts through a century later with startling clarity. William Graham Sumner was the most feared intellectual in late nineteenth-century America. A Yale professor who believed that government intervention in the economy was not merely inefficient but morally corrupting, he attacked protectionism as a scheme by the few to steal from the many, defended sound money as the foundation of honest commerce, and argued that the State's power to tax was a power to destroy. These essays, written between 1883 and 1914, constitute a relentless brief for classical liberal individualism against every form of economic paternalism. Sumner's ideas have been dismissed, attacked, and periodically revived. But if you want to understand the intellectual foundations of limited government and free trade in American thought, you must reckon with this fierce, uncompromising voice.