U.S. History

On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop are joined by Patrick Newman.

In the spirit of a new Cold War, Matthew Kroenig and Dan Negrea have written a new book, We Win, They Lose: Republican Foreign Policy and the New Cold War, which tries to fuse the foreign policies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. The result is a foreign policy Frankenstein.

One of the outcomes of the American Civil War was the movement toward centralization of political power in Washington. The Reconstruction regime imposed upon the former Confederate states following the war was an overt attempt to further impose federal power there.

The standard belief is that slavery was about obtaining “cheap labor,“ yet nothing could be further from the truth. Slavery comes with high opportunity costs, which is why American slave owners depended upon several government regulations to subsidize their “peculiar institution.”

Academic historians and archivists have been captured by the hard left and the DEI industry. Not only will the current trends make them bad historians, but it also makes them intolerant people. Mises knew better.

In the past four years, a number of monuments honoring the Confederacy have been torn down or removed. As we have seen before, however, the activism behind this movement will not stop with just taking down Confederate symbols.

Watching the Federal Reserve's inflationary “strategy” of enacting repeated “stimulus” and creating asset bubbles, one is reminded of the “Cargo Cult” in the South Pacific after the end of World War II. 

In the present age of denouncing “colonialism,” we need to better understand what imperialism was and why it came about. David Gordon critiques Joseph Schumpeter‘s account of western imperialism of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The US Armed Forces expand their footprints in the Indian Ocean, not to defend this country, but to expand military power. The Diego Garcia base has left a trail of ruined lives for those forced off their land to make room for yet another military base.

Despite claims from progressive historians that US slavery was a natural outgrowth of a free market economy, the reality is that slavery would have been much costlier without governments—federal and state—subsidizing it. It is time to set the record straight.