The transforming ideology of the American Revolution consists of four elements: liberalism, republicanism, English law, and Protestantism. Liberalism was developed by the Levellers, saying that natural rights could be evolved from natural law.
Recorded at the Reassessing the Presidency seminar; March 2004. (30:28)
Jeffersonian States Rights Doctrine until the Civil War was grounded in three freedom documents: The Declaration of Independence, The Articles of Confederation, and The Treaty of Paris of 1783. Those documents emphasized independent states, not a single nation or union.
Before there was the Federal Reserve there was the second Bank of the United States (1817–1836). Since the late nineteenth century, historians and economists have lauded this institution for its salutary control over the currency, its regulation of the state banks, its prudent stewardship of the government’s funds, and its example of a fruitful private/public partnership in the field of central banking.
Ryan McMaken provides a sweeping roundup of false perceptions of the American West. The story is not one of unrelenting violence but of hard work, trade, peace, and the tedium of daily life. The development of the West was not dependent on the soldier with the rifle, but on the blacksmith, the school teacher, and the saloon owner.
The Republicans have done it again. With their new Medicare bill, they’ve made government even bigger.
If the ruling elite has its way, writes Scott Trask, we are to be faced with at least half a century of intermittent war and a further augmentation of the national security state that has been draining our wealth like a voracious vampire since 1950. There is no secret as to how they will finance it—by borrowing and inflating. If the Democrats are the party of "tax and spend," the Republicans are the party of "borrow and spend."
The government sets price its flu shot at zero and then wonders how to account for shortages. That's just the beginning of the long history of government errors concerning the flu, writes William Anderson. In the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, an estimated 500,000 Americans died of Spanish Influenza. The outbreak coincided with the last days and the immediate post-armistice days of World War I, with government actions guaranteeing that the flu would spread rapidly.
