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The traditional story is familiar to American schoolchildren: the American Indians possessed a profound spiritual kinship with nature, and were unusually solicitous of environmental welfare. According to a popular book published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1991, “Pre-Columbian America was still the First Eden, a pristine natural kingdom. The

It is a cliché of publishing to observe, when a book appears before the public years after it was first written, that it is more relevant now than ever. But it is difficult to think of how else The Betrayal of the American Right can be described. Murray N. Rothbard chronicles the emergence of an American right wing that gave lip service to

[Originally published August 13, 2008] It’s been 75 years since the federal government, on the spurious grounds of fighting the Great Depression, ordered the confiscation of all monetary gold from Americans, permitting trivial amounts for ornamental or industrial use. This happens to be one of the episodes Kevin Gutzman and I describe in detail in

“Advocates of the free market must confront the fact that both the Great Depression and the current financial chaos were preceded by years of laissez-faire economic policies,” write Katrina van den Heuvel, editor of The Nation , and author Eric Schlossel. Knowing full well that inanities like this would become the received version of events, I

“The Therapist” (1937) by Rene Magritte Last weekend, Harvard University sponsored a conference called (I am not making this up) “The Free Market Mindset: History, Psychology, and Consequences.” Its purpose was to try to figure out why, since everyone knows the current crisis amounts to a failure of the market economy, the stupid rubes continue to

[An audio version of this article, read by the author, is available as a free MP3 download .]   In case you’ve ever wondered what it must have been like to read Pravda , reading the American media’s treatment of the financial crisis and our wise leaders’ expert management of it all has given everyone a wonderful opportunity. For instance, check

“The time to worry about depressions,” F.A. Hayek once wrote, “is, unfortunately, when they are furthest from the minds of most people.” He’s right, of course: imagine trying to tell a house flipper in 2004 that the housing market was a giant bubble that was going to burst. At best he’d smile politely, and then roll around in his fresh pile of

We all encounter more than our share of foolish blog posts. Most of the time you simply have to let them be. You could spend the rest of your life correcting drones and automatons who will never have an original or unconventional thought no matter how much you prod them. Their seventh-grade teacher, who was also the track coach, taught them what

[This article was first published in the Fall 2009 issue of The Intercollegiate Review .]   It is a cliché that if we do not study the past we are condemned to repeat it. Almost equally certain, however, is that if there are lessons to be learned from an historical episode, the political class will draw all the wrong ones — and often deliberately

In 1896, Brooks Adams wrote a book called The Law of Civilization and Decay . Like most late-19th-century commentators, he believed that his country was nearing a watershed in its history. But unless America rallied around a strong leader, the center of world power, which he thought might be about to shift from England to the United States, would