Topic: History

The Essence of Bastiat: David Hart’s Farewell Tour of the U.S. (Video)

– January 16, 2020

As the home of the Bastiat Society, the work of Frederic Bastiat is especially meaningful to AIER. As such, we were overjoyed to welcome David M. Hart, one of the world’s foremost scholars on Bastiat, to speak on the life and times of our favori …

History

The Academic Voldemort Principle

– January 13, 2020

It’s fundamentally a case of academic misconduct — of denying another due credit for their work, or preventing that work from even entering the conversation as you simultaneously attempt to rationalize confining your opponents to the territory of “he who shall not be named.”

History

Joseph A. Schumpeter, Outsider Looking In

– January 13, 2020

All of Joseph Schumpeter’s writings are “a splendid excursion down the river of time, with good talk and magnificent vistas” – and as such he remains, in many ways, one of those timeless and uniquely thought-provoking contributors to economics.

History

Who Is the Real Alexander Hamilton?

– January 12, 2020

What Hamilton did not do as treasury secretary is implement, or espouse, any system of protective tariffs or bounties.

History, Socialism

The Soviet Economy Was Not Growing; It Was Dying

– January 10, 2020

Warren Nutter’s assessment was no abstraction, but rather the result of years of close study of the relationship between state policy and industrial concentration in the United States – the subject of his dissertation at the University of Chicago.

Authoritarianism, History

If Libertarianism Hollowed Out, Why?

– January 8, 2020

Becoming a libertarian doesn’t mean leaving your humanity behind; on the contrary, it means embracing it fully and believing that the potential of a free life on earth is far from fully realized.

History

Five Great and Recent Books on Economic History

– January 7, 2020

The field of economic history is a hard one to dabble in. It requires the assembly of rich and complex data from the past. Unlike modern statistical series, there are no “user guides” for economists and historians who deal with past data. One must simp …

History

The 1619 Project Debate: A Bibliography

– January 3, 2020

As the debate over the New York Times’ 1619 Project continues, it is helpful to have a list of resources that encompass the project’s contents and criticisms of the same. What follows below is a bibliographic reference to each, which I will also period …

History, Regulation

The Year in Bad Ideas

– December 27, 2019

The Green New Deal. Hipster Antitrust. Breaking Up Big Tech. Protectionism. Billionaire Tears. New Tech, Old Jobs. Bitcoin Maximalism. Don’t Inhale That. Elizabeth Warren. National Conservatism.

History

My Most Notable Articles of 2019

– December 26, 2019

How Capitalist Abolitionists Fought Slavery This was my favorite piece to write over the last year because it explored a little-known historical episode in which the New York financier Lewis Tappan used market innovation to advance the abolition of sla …

History

Those Shepherds Abiding in the Fields Were Private Security Workers

– December 24, 2019

People talk like capitalism is some strange foreign invader, a mechanical system that was imposed on the world a couple hundred years ago, fueled by burning coal and emitting smoke, and certainly not anything organic to the social order. This is prepos …

History

Fact Checking the 1619 Project and Its Critics

– December 23, 2019

The New York Times’ 1619 Project entered a new phase of historical assessment when the paper published a scathing criticism by five well-known historians of the American Revolution and Civil War eras. The group included previous critics James McPherson …