Both Brazil and the US had slavery in the 1800s, but the US economy flourished while Brazil’s languished. If slavery was the engine for US economic growth, as leftists claim, then why didn’t Brazil's economy match that of the US?
The latest reminder of the Federal Reserve's record of failure, which now extends longer than five years, comes with the most recent inflation measure.
In the name of “saving” college sports, Congress steps well past its bounds to micromanage the NCAA.
Lenin wrote that the capitalists would provide the rope by which they would hang themselves. That certainly seems to be the case with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which received strong financial help from the center of crony capitalism itself: Wall Street.
By the close of the 1920s, business elites led by Wall Street had secured government enforcement of their cartels across banking, industry, transportation, and health.
World War I wrecked European finance and opened the door for the dollar to displace the pound. Patrick Newman follows Thomas Lamont and Paul Warburg’s ambitions for an imperial banking system, the Fed’s first inflationary boom and bust, and the 1920s high tide of the Money Lords.
The Beef Trust, the pure-food coalition, and the American Medical Association: three campaigns waged in the name of public health.
Barred from rate associations after 1897, the railroads formed communities of interest by buying their competitors’ stock—cartels in a disguised form.
Patrick Newman traces the Federal Trade Commission’s cartelizing arc: “advance advice,” uniform cost accounting, a brief Wilson reversal, Harding-Coolidge recapture, and Hoover’s subsidies and patent restrictions.
After the merger wave of 1898 and 1899, big business wanted relief from antitrust suits and protection from price-cutting.
Patrick Newman covers Jekyll Island, the National Citizens’ League organized as a front to manufacture grass-roots support, and the pivot once Congress refused the Aldrich plan.
Patrick Newman traces the National Banking System from Salmon P. Chase’s wartime bond sales and initially hostile relations with New York financiers through the pyramid of bankers’ balances that concentrated reserves on Wall Street.
Beginning with the Morrill Tariff of 1861, Patrick Newman documents protection sought and monopoly repeatedly denied. Market competition kept defeating attempts to corner markets.
Patrick Newman shows how the Interstate Commerce Commission supplied the enforcement common law would not, with commissioners reading their mandate in the railroads’ favor and cartelization temporarily strengthened at the shippers’ expense.
A transcontinental railroad was unprofitable on market terms, but attractive once Congress supplied land and subsidies.
Patrick Newman shows how liberty-minded reformers, once holding the levers of power, were pulled toward favoritism of their own.
Patrick Newman defines cronyism as government intervention that benefits special interests at the expense of the public interest, and argues the corporatist state was built in stages over eight decades rather than arriving at once.
Thomas Sargent places Patrick Newman in a tradition of American historians—Charles Beard, Forrest McDonald, Richard Hofstadter, and Murray Rothbard—who compress data and look for patterns in how the state is designed and managed.
Patrick Newman describes this volume as the second act in a three-act play, the bridge connecting the country’s founding to the modern America of the present generation.
Get ready to hear a lot about how we need government regulation to ensure that only state-approved, expensive, crony "capitalist" firms are allowed to develop AI.
