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In my recent social media discussions on the subject of free trade, a certain thread of argument related to GDP has become more common. The argument, such as it goes, asserts that international trade is not very important as a component of GDP. The net impact of trade is a small impact on GDP, with imports and exports generally “balancing” each other out, leaving just a few percentage points either way.

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The Problem with Lincoln is the culmination of Tom DiLorenzo’s many years of research on Abraham Lincoln. It is a masterly summing-up and extension of his earlier classics The Real Lincoln (2002) and Lincoln Unmasked (2006). DiLorenzo is both a historian and an economist with an expert knowledge of Austrian economics and also of the public choice school. This background enables him to grasp what most other historians of the Civil War period miss, the centralizing economic plan behind Lincoln’s policies.