Numerous studies have found that government spending multipliers have a very low value. Indeed one recent study found that in a country with characteristics like the U.S., it was significantly negative.

Grant defeated Lee, the Confederacy crumbled, and the idea of secession disappeared forever, or at least that’s what the conventional wisdom says. Secession is no historical irrelevance. Quite the contrary, the topic is integral to classical liberalism. Indeed, the right of secession follows at once from the basic rights defended by classical liberalism. As even Macaulay’s schoolboy knows, classical liberalism begins with the principle of self-ownership: each person is the rightful owner of his or her own body.

From one of his Newsweek Business Tides columns: “The favorite demand of most tax “reformers” is that we must “close the loopholes.” But what is a loophole? Those who invoke the catchword never refer to the exemptions and deductions that apply to the low-bracket incomes. They use it only to stigmatize the deductions that those who earn high incomes are permitted to take, implicitly or explicitly, by the law. They do not stop to ask whether a deduction is fair or unfair. Do a few abuse it? Then it should be denied to everybody.

Tax loopholes are universally denounced across the political spectrum. Democrats revile them as egregious giveaways to the “rich” that should all be tightly sealed up in the interests of “revenue enhancement” for deficit reduction, infrastructure investment, propping up collapsing entitlement programs, etc. Republicans condemn them as major barriers to the implementation of a more business- and investor-friendly flat tax.

I am teaching an AP US History class and we are discussing the tariff controversies of the 1820s. I wanted to discuss the Harrisburg Convention of 1827 and looked for some quick references. Nothing in the Britannica hard copy, nothing on Wikipedia. I then searched the Mises.org website and found a 22-page article on PDF by W. Kesler Jackson from The Libertarian Papers (2010). Many thanks to the Ludwig von Mises Institute for making this type of free market publication available.