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When Charles Adams published his book For Good and Evil , a world history of taxation, the most controversial chapter by far was the one on whether or not tariffs caused the American War between the States. That chapter generated so much discussion and debate that Adams’s publisher urged him to turn it into an entire book, which he did, in the

Your book The Real Lincoln  came out, it was a huge seller, and then this mad controversy broke loose. DiLorenzo : The controversy began even before the book came out. Illana Mercer of WorldNet Daily wrote a column  about the book, praising it to the skies. That pleased me very much. But then the critics started blasting away, without ever having

In The Essential Calhoun ( TEC ), editor Clyde Wilson commented that “it is curious how ignorant contemporary advocates of free markets are of tariff struggles in nineteenth-century America.”  There is much truth in this statement, since most advocates of free markets seem to be more interested in pure economic theory than in history.

No private enterprise, whatever its size, can ever become bureaucratic as long as it is entirely and solely operated on a profit basis.  --Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism The Dow Jones Industrial Average would be several thousand points higher, were it not for government regulation that causes corporations to divert immeasurable resources to

The Scana Corporation is a government-created monopoly that provides electricity to most of the state of South Carolina . Like all regulated corporations, it is pressured by regulators to promote politically correct causes and policies--or else.   Scana recently ordered its employees to remove Confederate flag bumper stickers from their cars if

The anticipation surrounding the new movie “Gods and Generals,” which opens today, underscores the continuing fascination that Americans (and the world) have with the meaning of the Civil War. It also reflects a growing awareness that the simple story of Northern liberators versus Southern slaveholders fails to do justice to the truth. But what

In Human Action Ludwig von Mises wrote that labor unions have always been the primary source of anti-capitalistic propaganda. I was reminded of this recently when I saw a bumper sticker proclaiming one of the bedrock tenets of unionism:  “The Union Movement: The People Who Brought You the Weekend.” Well, not exactly. In the U.S. the average work

I n response to an earlier article on Mises.org in which I described why capitalism, and not labor unions, have given us more and more leisure time quite a few people emailed me to ask: ”But aren’t workers at a disadvantage in bargaining individually for wages, and aren’t unions valuable for that reason?” I never argued that unions had no value,

Imagine that I get together with my friends in Auburn (say, Lew Rockwell and Joseph Stromberg) and open up a coffee shop in Auburn , Alabama called “The Austrian Café.”  We offer a selection of strong, European coffee, assorted desserts, and occasional music (sing-alongs on Friday and Saturday evenings, in German and English). It turns out to be

Macroeconomic model builders have finally realized what Henry Hazlitt and John T. Flynn (among others) knew in the 1930s:  FDR’s New Deal made the Great Depression longer and deeper. It is a myth that Franklin D. Roosevelt “got us out of the Depression” and “saved capitalism from itself,” as generations of Americans have been taught by the state’s