If Libertarianism Hollowed Out, Why?
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.
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Five Great and Recent Books on Economic History
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 …
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The 1619 Project Debate: A Bibliography
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 …
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The Year in Bad Ideas
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.
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My Most Notable Articles of 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 …
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Those Shepherds Abiding in the Fields Were Private Security Workers
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 …
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Fact Checking the 1619 Project and Its Critics
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 …
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The Miracle of the Free Market
One of the great fallacies arrogantly believed in by those in political power is the notion that they can know enough to manage and command the lives of everyone in society with better results than if people are left to live their own lives as they fre …
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What Arthur Burns Broke, Paul Volcker Fixed
Inflation came down and stayed down. Indeed, the public came to believe the Fed chair was willing to do whatever it takes to keep inflation low and steady.
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The New History of Capitalism Has a “Whiteness” Problem
Thus do we arrive at the unenviable position where scholars in the New History of Capitalism genre are guilty of the very same faults that they invoke to dismiss critics of the 1619 Project.
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Alexander Hamilton, the Other Tariff Man Who Created a Mess
One of the many unsettling features of Donald Trump is his deep-seated antipathy to the time-honored doctrine of free trade. Even as early as 2016, Trump devoted a substantial portion of his Republican Convention speech calling for the adoption of prot …
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Mary, Joseph, and the Real ID
Think about this story as you contemplate the surveillance, the identity politics, the impending internal passports, and the demographic controls of modern statism. These are tools of oppression.
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