U.S. History

I became interested in the question of whether a true market in healthcare can work. I think it is a fantastically interesting subject. It has been the focus of my PhD work.

Bishop sees in the rise of the Republican Party, culminating in Lincoln’s election, the beginning of a Marxist revolution.

The American Revolution was fought to free American colonists from an overbearing British government. Yet, only a few years after independence, Americans had created a constitutional government that would wield much power than anything the British had.

The 19th century saw the creation and expansion of railroads in the United States, which hauled freight and carried paying passengers. One offshoot from privately-owned railroads was the creation of company-built and -operated hospitals to treat their employees in remote locations.

Jonathan Newman joins Ryan McMaken to talk about the history behind the myth of "Fed independence." The Fed has never been politically independent of the US government, and it has enthusiastically helped fund the US government both in wartime and in peacetime. 

Tom Paine is one of the forgotten names of the American Revolution, but it can be argued that no other man was as important in galvanizing the thoughts of American colonials toward independence.

Mark Thornton discusses a lesser-known factor in the American Civil War: the Confederate “impressment” policy and its impact at Vicksburg.

The simple narrative today of the southern secession in 1860 and 1861 is that the southern states believed that the institution of slavery was being threatened, so they left the union. However, the real causes are more complex and do not fit any preconceived narrative.

MMT and chartalism claims that money is a creature of the state and is valued because of state action. The fact that tobacco acted as colonial money independently of the state demonstrates this to be false.

Rumor has it that the Federal Reserve was able to resist the president‘s demands to enable funding of the Korean War. However, a look at the record demonstrates conclusively that the Fed bowed to Harry Truman‘s wishes to do what it has done for a century: finance America‘s wars.