There is a myth that Progressive humanitarians agitated for meat-packing regulations which now protect us from disease. The reality is that the big meat packers themselves wanted regulation to help crush the competition.
While searching through my apartment after a tragic fire, under soot and ash, I found these “lost” Rothbard lectures, recorded at NYU in 1979 and 1980.
If violence is the key to creating wealth, as Desmond insinuates, then the communist nations would have created fabulous amounts of wealth given the brutality of 20th-century Stalinism.
Defenders of slavery so vehemently opposed free labor, they claimed the "wage slavery" system was even worse than slave labor. The idea being that slavery is morally superior to wage labor.
The resurgent claim that the modern economy was built on slavery is yet another attempt to attack capitalism while also claiming "we are all to blame" for slavery. The slave owners of old tried a very similar tactic.
It is troubling that after a decade of an economic expansion, the US government is still spending money as it does during and immediately following a recession. It is as if the economy is now in a state of permanent "stimulus."
