Joe Klein of Time magazine once went on a network television show and accused Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin of “sedition” because of their criticisms of the Obama administration’s expenditure of trillions of dollars of corporate welfare in the form of bailouts; its Soviet-style nationalization of automobile, banking, student loan, and mortgage industries; its historically wild spending and borrowing binge; its advocacy of socialized medicine; and its plans to tax American capitalism into bankruptcy.

A “court historian” is someone who produces statist propaganda disguised as “scholarship.” The purpose of the court historian is to provide cover, to pull the wool over the public’s eyes, to make excuses for, and glorify the state and the ruling class. A corollary purpose is to criticize or even demonize the civil society, especially the private enterprise system.

Much has been written about the famous debate between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton over the constitutionality of America’s first central bank, the Bank of the United States (BUS).

Americans were not always slaves to government bureaucracy in the way that they are today. One of the best historical examples of this is how Americans once utilized the Jeffersonian states’ rights tradition of nullification and interposition to assist President Andrew Jackson in his battle to defund the Second Bank of the United States, the successor of the first Bank of the United States (BUS).

Ludwig von Mises believed that the generation of price inflation by central banks was an “indispensable means of militarism” because it renders the repercussions of war much less obvious. “War weariness” would set in much more quickly if wars were financed by direct taxation instead.

Monetary policy under the direction of the Federal Reserve Board has a history of creating and destroying jobs. The reason for this is that the Fed, like all other central banks, has always been a generator of boom-and-bust cycles in the economy. Why this is so is explained in three classic treatises in Austrian economics: The Theory of Money and Credit by Ludwig von Mises; Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle by F.A. Hayek; and Prices and Production by Hayek.

One of the more absurd spectacles during the “Great Recession” was how so many commentators blamed the crash on a Fed that was “too libertarian” and not enough of a central planning board. Business historian John Steele Gordon wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the cause of the crash was the “baleful” influence of Thomas Jefferson and his anti-central banking views that still live on today. Wall Street stockbroker Henry Kaufman wrote in the Financial Times that “libertarian dogma” had led the Fed astray.

Ever since its founding in 1913 the Fed has portrayed itself as an “independent” agency operated by selfless public servants striving to centrally plan the U.S. economy through monetary policy. In reality, however, a non-political government enterprise is as likely as a cat that barks like a dog or a dog that meows. Yet the myth of the “independent” and apolitical Fed persists and the economics textbooks have helped perpetuate the myth for decades.