How should we approach the study of history? An unfortunate trend has been to implement “history by theory” in which practitioners take theories and present them as facts. An honest approach is to take the historical facts and interpret them through coherent theories.
In the 1870s and 1880s, and through the 1920s, it's clear that many legislators and judges did not agree that birthright citizenship applied to everyone born in the borders of the US. The modern interpretation is highly debatable.
Mainstream economists define “inflation” as general increases in consumer and producer prices. Yet, such a definition misses why prices increase in the first place and why inflation should be described as an artificial increase in the money supply.
Not only was Joe Biden a failed president domestically, but he also was a failure in his foreign policy. From sending troops to Haiti, to the Ukraine war, to conflict in the Middle East, Biden never missed an opportunity to make a bad situation worse.
How did the US go from a nation that revered liberty to one with despotic governance? While political forces already were trying to push the US in a direction of centralization, the Civil War completed the job. We see the results of those centralized outcomes daily.
Without the discipline of profit-and-loss, the desires and goals of the bureaucrats, limited only by the prescriptions and budget of the legislature, necessarily guide policy.
Unrestricted birthright citizenship is increasingly rare, and with only a few exceptions, it persists only in countries with negative or near-zero rates of in-migration.
Why do we study history? Some study it as a way to confirm their own political ideologies, something that often happens when historians look at the US Civil War and its Reconstruction aftermath. According to Ludwig von Mises, one cannot bring an ideological lens and honestly approach history.
Jonathan Newman appears on the show to discuss Bob's recent debate on ZeroHedge, which centered on Austrian economics versus Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).
Most Americans think of Abraham Lincoln in hagiographic terms, the man who “saved” the United States from destruction. A closer look gives us a different picture of “Honest Abe.” David Gordon reviews a book that very much questions the Lincoln mythology.
