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That war is not productive may seem self-evident to Misesians but it is not to the “educated” public who have been taught that World War II ended the Depression and that deficit spending (of whatever kind it doesn’t matter) spurs economic growth. Americans show not the slightest awareness that every dollar spent on the ongoing Afghan and Iraqi

No matter how much the American economy grows during the next decade, the government will have serious trouble funding expanding entitlements, increased education spending, and ongoing wars in the Middle East, while maintaining a global military constabulary and presence everywhere. Something has to give. No matter how one crunches the numbers, a

As in so much else, the French revolutionary regime (1789–94) was the precursor of the centralized, totalitarian, managerial, pseudo-democratic despotisms that now reign over the West. It is also reminder that mass democracy and inflation go together, as surely as thunder and lightning. Let us revisit the Revolution, from a free-market, hard-money

As an American historian who knows something of economic law, having learned from the Austrians, I became intrigued with how the United States had remained prosperous, its economy still so dynamic and productive, given the serious and recurring economic fallacies to which our top leaders (political, corporate, academic) have subscribed and from

[This article was excerpted from chapter 3 of Reassessing the Presidency , edited by John V. Denson.] Was Thomas Jefferson a great president? One’s answer to that question depends on how one defines “greatness.” If we define greatness as how far a president leads the United States down its historically determined path toward the centralized

When Jefferson ran for president in 1800, he made it clear that he supported strict construction, original intent jurisprudence, federalism, and states’ rights: I do then, with sincere zeal, wish an inviolable preservation of our present federal Constitution, according to the true sense in which it was adopted by the States. I am for preserving

Thomas Jefferson’s second term was marked by the growing controversy with Great Britain over the latter’s increasing restrictions on and seizures of American commerce and impressments of American seamen. These began and steadily increased after the resumption of war between Great Britain and France in 1803. The two chief points of controversy were

Volume 18, Number 4 (2004) Trask, H.A. Scott. “William Graham Sumner: Against Democracy, Plutocracy, and Imperialism.” Journal of Libertarian Studies 18, No. 4 (2004): 1–27.

  Volume 8, No. 2 (Summer 2005)   Sumner was the product of an indigenous American hard-money tradition that embraced free markets, free trade, and sound banking—a tradition that has much in common with the Austrian School in its theoretical and political orientation. His understanding of economic theory came from his reading of classical

The Free Market 23, no. 10 (October 2003)   T he tax bills of many American families are falling during a period of exorbitant increases in federal spending due mainly to war and welfare spending. Odd? Not once we discover the record levels of government debt accumulation. It’s the shell game of government finance at work. The bills must be paid,