Mises Daily

Thaddeus Russell’s A Renegade History of the United States is an important new book: a demonstration that rebels and renegades are society’s benefactors. In this revisionist view of American history, you see, there is “an enduring civil war” between these two factions — the “renegades” and the “moral guardians,” whom he also calls the “disciplinarians.”

Living half of one’s life as a slave and half as the master is not the same as being free.

The characters are rugged individuals — ingenious in their ability to fend for themselves, under all manner of adverse conditions — and asking for help from nobody.

Higher food prices set off the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and the mass protests in countries like Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, and Iran. People in these countries buy more unprocessed foods and spend a much higher percentage of their income on food, so they have been severely impoverished by Bernanke's QE2.

He has been saying things that sound surprisingly Austrian in regards to the limits of monetary policy.

[An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Steven Ng, is

Announcing that 50 million Americans are uninsured means nothing. It could be our government’s involvement that has led to the current situation.

Tunisia and Egypt have a massive youth-unemployment problem. Unsurprisingly, they also have a system of "free" college education.

Firms have lots of cash on their balance sheet and it's not earning anything. What to do? Buy the competition.

Higgs's book is that rare and wondrous combination: scholarly and hard-hitting, lucidly written and libertarian as well.