U.S. History

Recorded at the Mises Institute, May 1994.

Recorded at the Reassessing the Presidency seminar; March 2004.

Thomas Sowell’s book, Civil Rights, lays bare many of the myths of the Great Society. What did ordinary people do before an advanced welfare state? Anti-poverty programs like the 1965 Job Corps did not turn out well. There was less poverty before the programs. Federal aid to education, like Head Start, did not stop any cycle of poverty. There was no difference in performance.

One of the problems of the American Empire is that there is a lot of empire denial going around. You cannot want to rule the world and yet say that what you value is laissez-faire economics (like National Review does).

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.

Before the Fed blessed this country with unlimited liquidity, American history saw two previous attempts at creating a centralized institution of money and credit: the First and Second Banks of the United States. Both generated financial havoc, and were rightly opposed by the champions of freedom and sound money. Historian Scott Trask explains.