In 1949, amid the disbelief of New York’s intelligentsia, a newly-arrived professor from Europe—courteous in manner and relentless in argument—began teaching at New York University. His name was Ludwig von Mises—a refugee from Nazi tyranny, but above all, an exile from an academic world that had embraced statism with the same passion it had once devoted to progress.

One hundred sixty years after the war for Southern independence, great confusion is still caused by the claim that the South fought for their independence and for “states’ rights.” What does the doctrine of “states’ rights” mean in this context? The dictionary definition is easily understood: “the rights and powers held by individual US states rather than by the federal government.”

Most economists are in agreement that, through statistical and mathematical methods, one can organize historical data into a useful body of information, which can serve as the basis both for economic theory and assessments of the state of the economy. It is also believed that the knowledge secured from the data is tentative since it is not possible to know all the information and future empirical information might falsify previous theory.