The main victims at the World Trade Center were, after all, working for the private sector. They were traders and merchants, people dedicated to economic enterprise. In an ironic tribute to their value, these people were targeted because the terrorists hoped to cripple the US economy. It would appear that the terrorists understood something that even our own elites do not understand.
Newport, Rhode Island, is surely one of the most spectacular places in the United States, and, for what its amazing mansions of the Gilded Age represent, it should be considered the Mecca of American capitalist private wealth, suitable for pious pilgrimages of every sort.
American business, once held in high regard and master of all it surveyed during the frenzied booming 1990s, suddenly finds itself cast upon the rocks. The economic cycle of boom and bust is fascinating stuff. Its essential elements are repeated endlessly throughout the dusty pages of financial history. All of this makes Murray Rothbard’s book, The Panic of 1819, particularly interesting, timely, and enlightening.
As soon as Abraham Lincoln and the new Republican Party gained power, the average tariff rate was quickly raised from a nominal 15 percent to 47 percent and higher, and remained at such levels for decades after the war. South Carolinian John C. Calhoun's free-trade arguments, as eloquent and advanced as they were, were no match for a federal military arsenal.
Why is The Real Lincoln so much superior to Harry Jaffa’s A New Birth of Freedom? Jaffa offers a purely textual study: he considers, as if he were dealing with Aristotle or Dante,
Like mafioso John Gotti, the state uses the threat of coercion to extort money from citizens, writes William Anderson. Unlike Gotti, who never would have dreamed of demanding nearly half of a firm's profits, the state takes more than 40 percent of what a business collects over its costs.
Based on the record of deceit documented by Robert Caro in his book The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, Lyndon Baines Johnson was an evil man even before his disastrous presidency--a presidency in which he and his minions misled Americans into the Vietnam War, a presidency that nearly caused a civil war in this country.
"The myth of Lincoln cannot stand up under scrutiny," says Thomas DiLorenzo, "and after all these years, the word is finally getting out." Mises.org interviews DiLorenzo on his new book and its thesis that Lincoln's legacy was not freedom but the consolidated state. The book's high sales are as notable as the explosive controversy that has erupted about his thesis.
Philadelphia was the home not only of the first two federal banks, but it was the home of the two libertarian political economists who introduced and defended the independent treasury idea into the public consciousness, and created public pressure for its enactment.
