JFK's Tax Cuts on This Day in History

 

Similarities between JFK and Trump

This day in history: On this day in 1962, President Kennedy announced in a press conference that he would seek "an across-the-board reduction in personal and corporate income taxes", commenting that "Our tax structure, as presently weighted, exerts too heavy a drain on a prospering economy." At the time, earnings of more than $200,000 were in a 91% federal tax bracket. In 1965, the top rate would drop to 70%. By 1988, the highest rate would be 28% for income over $31,050.

By January of 1963, Kennedy would go on to say: “The largest single barrier to full employment of our manpower and resources and to a higher rate of economic growth is the unrealistically heavy drag of federal income taxes on private purchasing power, initiative and incentive.”

“Our tax system still siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power and reduces the incentive for risk, investment and effort — thereby aborting our recoveries and stifling our national growth rate.”

"Kennedy’s speechwriter and longtime aide, Ted Sorensen, said, 'Kennedy was a fiscal conservative. Most of us and the press and historians have, for one reason or another, treated Kennedy as being much more liberal than he so regarded himself at the time… in fiscal matters, he was extremely conservative, very cautious about the size of the budget.'” 21 Reasons JFK Was Actually A Conservative

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Venezuela's Hugo Chávez on This Day in History

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This Day In History: Socialist Hugo Chávez becomes victorious in the Venezuelan presidential elections on this day in 1999...a bad day for Venezuela. In 1950, Venezuela ranked among the top ten most prosperous nations in the world. In 1959, the Venezuelan GDP per capita was 10 percent higher than America’s. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world and should be a very wealthy country. However, since Chavez (and Maduro) took power, the median monthly income is now $8. Roughly 90 percent of Venezuelans today live below the poverty line. Venezuelans have lost an average 24 pounds and have been reduced to eating pets and zoo animals. 

"It seems Chavez’s claim that 'the only way to save the world is through socialism,' was, unsurprisingly, incorrect. Some organizations and individuals, from Oxfam to Jeremy Corbyn, once admired Venezuela’s socialist experiment. Today, they are curiously silent about Venezuela’s decline. For the rest for the world, the now-impoverished nation offers a clear reminder of the necessity of property rights for any functioning economy." Source

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German-American Economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe on This Day in History

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Today in History: German political philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe was born on this day in 1949. Hoppe, who can be described as an Austrian school libertarian anarcho-capitalist economist who is best know for his book "Democracy: The God that Failed."

In this book, Hoppe argues that democracy is not an improvement over monarchy. Politicians in a democracy have a very high time preference (they value immediate gratification) because they have to please their constituents in the short span of a term in order to get re-elected. Thus, democracy is short-sighted and favors short-term gains over long-term losses. Monarchy, on the other hand, is the opposite. Monarchs have low time preference for three reasons: (1) their reign lasts for a lifetime (2) they will pass their kingdom on to their heirs, and (3) they have total ownership of their kingdom. Hence, monarchs have a greater incentive to maintain their society over time.

Of course, Hoppe would rather have neither system, but it is food for thought.

Hoppe said the following about the Social Contract: "the state is anything but the result of a contract! No one with even just an ounce of common sense would agree to such a contract. I have a lot of contracts in my files, but nowhere is there one like this. The state is the result of aggressive force and subjugation. It has evolved without contractual foundation, just like a gang of protection racketeers. And concerning the struggle of all against all: that is a myth. Of course the racketeer protects his victims on “his” territory from other racketeers, but only so he can conduct his own racket more successfully. Moreover, it is states that are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people and immeasurable destruction in the 20th century alone. Compared to that, the victims of private crimes are almost negligible."

Hoppe also stated that democracy is just a “competition of crooks.” "All highly-developed forms of religion forbid the coveting of someone else’s property. This prohibition is the foundation of peaceful cooperation. In a democracy, on the other hand, anyone can covet anybody else’s property and act according to his desire—the only precondition being that he can gain access to the corridors of power. Thus, under democratic conditions, everybody becomes a potential threat. And during mass elections what tends to happen is that the members of society who attempt to access the corridors of power and rise to the highest positions are those who have no moral inhibitions about misappropriating other people’s property: habitual amoralists who are particularly talented in forging majorities out of a multitude of unbridled and mutually exclusive demands." Source

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The Panic of 1857 on This Day in History

 

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This Day In History: The financial Panic of 1857 started on this day in, of course, 1857. 

"During the nineteenth century the free world was on what was called the classical gold standard. It was a century of unprecedented production. More wealth and a greater standard of living was achieved and enjoyed by more people than in all the previous history of the world. The two conditions most responsible for the great increase in wealth during the nineteenth century were competitive capitalism and the gold standard: Capitalism because it provided a social system where men were free to produce and own the results of their labor; the gold standard because it provided a monetary system by which men could more readily exchange and save the results of their labor.

While capitalism afforded men the opportunity to trade in the open market which led to economic prosperity, the gold standard provided a market-originated medium of exchange and means of saving which led to monetary stability.

But because neither competitive capitalism nor the gold standard were ever fully understood or practiced, there existed a paradox during the nineteenth century: a series of disruptive economic and monetary crises in the midst of a century of prosperity.

These crises can all be traced to excessive supplies of money and credit. The U.S. panics of 1814, 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907 and the international monetary crises of 1933 and 1971 all have one thing in common: excessive supplies of money and credit. The fact is that no monetary crisis in history has ever resulted from a lack of money and credit. Every monetary crisis can be traced to excessive supplies of money and credit."

Where does this money and credit come from?

"...the world never achieved a pure gold standard. While individuals operated under a classical gold standard with the conviction that production was the only way to gain wealth, they allowed their government to become the exception to this rule.

Government produces nothing. During the nineteenth century it operated mostly on money it taxed from its citizens. As government’s role increased, so did its need for money.

The Policy Makers knew that gold stood in the way of government spending, that direct confiscation of wealth via taxation was unpopular. So Policy Makers advocated a way of indirectly taxing productive men in order to finance both government programs and the increasing government bureaucracy necessary to implement those programs.

The method was to increase the money supply. Since government officials were not about to go out and mine gold, they had to rely on an artificial increase. Although the methods of artificial monetary expansion varied, the net effect remained the same: an increase in the claims to goods in circulation and a general rise in commodity prices. The layman called this phenomenon 'inflation.' This resulted invariably in monetary crises and economic depressions.

Capitalism and gold got the blame for these crises, but the blame was undeserved." Paul Stevens

https://fee.org/articles/the-making-of-an-international-monetary-crisis/

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Vilfredo Pareto and the 80/20 Rule on This Day in History

Marxism is ignorant of the Pareto principle | Jordan Peterson & Bret Weinstein

This Day In History: Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto died on this day in 1923. VP gave us what has come to be called the Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule. According to legend, one day he noticed that 20% of the pea plants in his garden generated 80% of the healthy pea pods. Observing this caused him to think about uneven distribution. He then discovered that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by just 20% of the population elsewhere. He investigated further and found that 80% of production typically came from just 20% of the companies. The generalization became: 80% of results will come from just 20% of the action. An extended analysis tells us that 20% of the sales reps generate 80% of total sales, 20% of customers account for 80% of total profits, 20% of the most reported software bugs cause 80% of software crashes, 20% of patients account for 80% of healthcare spending, 20% of criminals commit 80% of crimes, 20% of drivers cause 80% of all traffic accidents, 20% of the world's population controls about 80% of the world's income.

Also, 20% of farmers produce 80% of the world's agriculture, 20% of your phone apps get 80% usage, 20% of shareholders own 80% of a corporation's stock, 20% of professional athletes cause 80% of ticket sales, 20% of bar liquor is consumed 80% of the time, 20% of your knowledge is used 80% of the time, etc.

If everyone started with an equal amount of money and then started to transact, 80% of the wealth would end in the hands of the 20%.

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Liberty's Masterful Storyteller, Frederic Bastiat on This Day in History

This day in history: Economist Frederic Bastiat was born on this day in 1801.

From Lawrence Reed:

“Sometimes standing against evil is more important than defeating it,” wrote novelist N.D. Wilson. “The greatest heroes stand because it is right to do so, not because they believe they will walk away with their lives. Such selfless courage is a victory in itself.”

In the last six of his 49 years of life, brought to an untimely end by tuberculosis, the classical liberal Frenchman Frédéric Bastiat produced an astonishing volume of books and essays in defense of free markets and free people. He towered over the smug intellectuals and politicians of his native France, most of whom were mentally mired in the country’s ancient traditions of statist central planning of the economy.

“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws,” he reasoned. “On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”

Bastiat also gave us perhaps the world’s most succinct description of the redistributive apparatus of government: “The State is the great fiction through which everyone lives at the expense of everyone else.”

The world in the 21st century is beset with economic fallacies that are, for the most part, modern versions of those that Bastiat demolished 16 decades ago.

If a posthumous Nobel Prize were to be awarded to just one person for crystal-clear writing and masterful storytelling in economics, no one would be more deserving of it than Bastiat. Here is the great pity of his short time on this earth: while he lived and ever since, his own country never possessed the collective wisdom to give him the honor and attention he deserved. His selfless courage in expressing timeless, irrefutable truths while almost all around him wallowed in fallacy constitutes a great moral victory indeed.

Bastiat was born in the port village of Bayonne on the Bay of Biscay in southern France. He was just 14 when the French defeat at Waterloo dispatched the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte and put the old monarchy back in place.

At 17, Bastiat was working for his family’s export business, where he experienced firsthand the absurdity of protectionism and other wealth-stifling trade restrictions of the French government. Of this period in Bastiat’s life, economist Jim Powell writes,

While he didn’t want a commercial career, he was interested in the civilizing influence of commerce and the many ways that laws hurt people. He observed, for instance, how the 1816 French tariff throttled trade, resulting in empty warehouses and idle docks around Bayonne. In 1819, the government put steep tariffs on corn, meat, and sugar, making poor people suffer from needlessly high food prices. High tariffs on English and Swiss cotton led to widespread smuggling.

Inheriting the estate of his grandfather upon the elder’s death in 1825, Bastiat could afford to devote considerable time to the thought, reading, and debates with friends that a few years later would yield an explosion of wit and wisdom from a prolific pen. He was elected to two minor public positions in the early 1830s: justice of the peace and county assemblyman.

Bastiat published his first article in 1844. He was 43 years old, but he understood the economic world better than almost anyone twice his age, and he knew better than anybody how to explain it with an economy of words. He employed everyday language, conversational tone, and an innate clarity that flowed from his logical and orderly presentation. Nothing he wrote was stilted, artificial, or pompous. He was concise and devastatingly to the point. To this day, nobody can read Bastiat and wonder, “Now what was that all about?”

He was unequivocal in his opposition to limitless government. “It is not true,” he wrote, “that the function of law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our wills, our education, our opinions, our work, our trade, our talents, or our pleasures. The function of law is to protect the free exercise of these rights, and to prevent any person from interfering with the free exercise of these same rights by any other person.”

David Hart is the editor of Liberty Fund’s English translation of The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat. He writes,

Bastiat thought the modern bureaucratic and regulatory State of his day was based on a mixture of outright violence and coercion on the one hand, and trickery and fallacies (sophisms) on the other. The violence and coercion came from the taxes, tariffs, and regulations, which were imposed on taxpayers, traders, and producers; the ideological dimension that maintained the current class of plunderers came from a new set of “political” and “economic sophisms” that confused, misled, and tricked a new generation of “dupes” into supporting the system. The science of political economy, according to Bastiat, was to be the means by which the economic sophisms of the present would be exposed, rebutted, and finally overturned, thus depriving the current plundering class of its livelihood and power.

Economics these days can be dull and lifeless, larded with verbosity and presumptuous mathematics. Bastiat proved that economics doesn’t have to be that way, or at least that the core truths of the science can be made lively and unforgettable. In literature, we think of good storytelling as an art and stories as powerful tools for understanding. Bastiat could tell a story that pierced you with its brilliance. If your misconceptions were his target, his stories could leave you utterly, embarrassingly disarmed.

Bastiat was unequivocal in his opposition to limitless government.

One of his most memorable analogies comes from “The Candlemaker’s Petition,” in which candlemakers protested to the government “the unfair competition of a foreign rival. This foreign manufacturer of light has such an advantage over us that he floods our domestic markets with his product. And he offers it at a fantastically low price.”

That competitor turns out to be the sun, which provides free light in competition with the makers of candles. Bastiat wittily demolished the proposed “remedy” of the protectionist candlemakers — forbidding windows or requiring that they be painted black — and explained that it is to society’s advantage to accept all the free sunlight it can get and use the resources that might otherwise go to candles to meet other needs.

Protectionist arguments such as those from the candlemakers came under relentless assault by Bastiat. Why should two countries that dig a tunnel through their mountainous border to facilitate travel and trade then seek to undo its advantages by imposing burdensome taxes at both ends? If an exporter sells his goods abroad for more than they were worth at home, then buys valuable goods with the proceeds to bring back to his homeland, why would anyone in his right mind condemn the transactions as yielding a balance of trade “deficit”? If you’re a protectionist before reading Bastiat, you’ll either repent after reading his work or forever remain in darkness with no excuse that you weren’t instructed otherwise.

Bastiat’s 1850 essay, “That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen,” introduced his famous parable of the broken window. It’s a brilliant exposition of what would later become known as “opportunity cost,” a core concept in economics. If a hoodlum breaks a baker’s window, the economy in general is not “stimulated” because the baker must now do business with a glazier. Less visible but just as real is the fact that to replace the broken glass, the baker must cancel his plans to buy other things, such as a suit of clothes. The act of destruction means a gain for the glazier, but that gain is more than offset by the losses of the baker and the tailor.

Bastiat served the last two years of his life in France’s Constituent and Legislative Assemblies, where he worked tirelessly to convince fellow members of the merits of freedom and free markets. They proved to be his toughest audience. Most were far more interested in selfish and ephemeral satisfactions (such as power, money, reelection, and the dispensing of favors to friends) than in eternal truths.

He could be devilishly brilliant in his denunciations of his colleagues with political power who presumed to plan the control the lives of others, as in this admonition:

Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough.

Or in this one, my personal favorite:

If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?

His most famous work is The Law, which appeared the year he died. Were it required reading in schools today, it would transform the world, as it has opened minds and changed lives for many decades.

Bastiat was interested in the civilizing influence of commerce and the many ways that laws hurt people.

Inspired by The Law and other contributions of Bastiat, a “network of principled business leaders” now bears his name: The Bastiat Society.

The world in the 21st century is beset with economic fallacies that are, for the most part, modern versions of those that Bastiat demolished 16 decades ago. The answers to the vexing problems those fallacies produce are rarely to be found in proposals that empower bureaucracy while imposing tortuous regulations on private behavior. It’s far more likely that the answers lie in the profound and permanent principles that Frédéric Bastiat did so much to illuminate, and to which Powell offers these words of tribute:

And so that frail Frenchman whose public career spanned just six years, belittled as a mere popularizer, dismissed as a dreamer and an ideologue, turns out to have been right. Even before Karl Marx began scribbling The Communist Manifesto in December 1847, Frédéric Bastiat knew that socialism is doomed. Marx called for a vast expansion of government power to seize privately owned land, banks, railroads, and schools, but Bastiat warned that government power is a mortal enemy, and he was right. He declared that prosperity is everywhere the work of free people, and he was right again. He maintained that the only meaningful way to secure peace is to secure human liberty by limiting government power, and he was right yet again. Bastiat took the lead, he stood alone when he had to, he displayed a generous spirit, he shared epic insights, he gave wings to ideas, and he committed his life for liberty. He earned his place among the immortals.

For further information, see:

• Jim Powell’s “Frédéric Bastiat: Ingenious Champion for Liberty and Peace”
• David Hart’s “Frédéric Bastiat on Legal Plunder”
• Richard Ebeling’s “Bastiat: Champion of Economic Liberty”
• Robert G. Bearce’s “In Defense of Freedom: Frédéric Bastiat”
• William Henry Chamberlain’s “The Wisdom of Bastiat”
• William L. Baker’s “Frédéric Bastiat: Harmonious Warrior”
• Dean Russell’s biography, Frédéric Bastiat: Ideas and Influence
• Video: A ten minute condensation of Bastiat’s The Law
• Connor Boyack’s adaption of The Law for children
• The Bastiat Society’s website

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. Reed is FEE's President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty, having served for nearly 11 years as FEE’s president (2008-2019). He is author of the 2020 book, Was Jesus a Socialist? as well as Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction and Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism. Follow on LinkedIn and Like his public figure page on Facebook. His website is www.lawrencewreed.com.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Elon Musk on This Day in History

This day in history: Elon Musk (Tesla) was born on this day in 1971. 

Elon Musk dropped an economic truth bomb on Joe Rogan’s podcast a couple of months ago.

“If you don’t make stuff, there’s no stuff.”

Obvious? You’d think so. But, as Musk pointed out, our economic policies throughout the COVID-19 pandemic have ignored that simple truth.

The prevailing assumption is that the government can press “pause” on the economy throughout the pandemic, throwing millions out of work, and then simply tide everyone over with relief checks.

“This notion,” said Musk, “that you can just sort of send checks out to everybody and things will be fine is not true.”

“They’ve become detached from reality,” he added. “You can’t just legislate money and solve these things.”

Musk’s point is indisputable. Government checks are only valuable to the extent that there is enough actual “stuff” (goods and services) available for those dollars to buy. The more you lock down production, the more our stock of “stuff” will shrink, and the more our living standards will worsen. No amount of zeros added to those government checks can change that.

When “stuff” dwindles, printing government checks cannot magically reverse that impoverishment. It can only do two things:

1. Shift who gets impoverished by redistributing wealth (that is, access to the remaining “stuff”), and
2. Delay the drop in living standards by enabling higher consumer spending.

Higher consumer spending means burning through our remaining “stuff” faster instead of investing it in production. This means even less “stuff” down the road.

It’s like if you lost your job and cheer yourself up by splurging on an expensive new TV. Government checks merely make us feel less poor by inducing us to further impoverish ourselves in reality. It postpones the pain today by condemning us to much greater pain tomorrow.

America has a lot of “stuff” to shift around and burn through, so we can delay the pain of impoverishment for quite a while. The same cannot be said for poor countries, however. People there have so little “stuff” that they feel the pain of production lockdowns immediately.

“If you don’t make the food,” Musk warned months ago, “if you don’t process the food, you don’t transport the food... there’s no stuff.”

And now, for hundreds of millions of people around the world, the stark truth of that statement is manifesting as empty stomachs and ruined lives.

According to a new report from World Vision, a global humanitarian organization, as many as 110 million children in Asia alone are facing hunger, and 85 million households across Asia have little or no food stocks as a result of the economic impact of COVID-19 and the lockdowns.

The report also found that as many as eight million children in Asia are being exposed to begging, child labor, and child marriage since parents are unable to buy food in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Our rapid assessments in countries across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia show that it’s clear we are on the cusp of a catastrophe for children,” said Norbert Hsu, World Vision’s partnership leader for global impact. “Without urgent action we risk an increase in extreme poverty and hunger not seen for decades.”

World Vision’s numbers are no outlier. Similar figures were recently reported by the World Bank.

Hsu doesn’t explain precisely what “urgent action” should be taken. It wouldn’t be surprising if it involved massive amounts of foreign aid, the usual remedy prescribed by such organizations.

But international “relief” is not a real solution for them, any more than domestic “relief” is for us. As Musk said, “You can’t just legislate money and solve these things.”

To meet these massive problems without making them worse, we need to come to grips with economic reality: especially the concept of scarcity, and how it pertains to production and money.

Only then will we fully understand just what we are setting ourselves up for by locking down the economy indefinitely to combat the pandemic. Only then will we be able to make truly informed judgments about the trade-offs involved.

The crisis facing the global poor is a heart-rending tragedy. It is also an ominous warning, the proverbial canary in a coal mine.

If we keep burning through our “stuff” faster than we’re replacing it, we will eventually descend into an economic crisis that dwarfs what we have been through so far, and our fraying social fabric may not be able to handle it.

Like gravity, scarcity can be denied, but it cannot be defied.

“If you don’t make stuff, there’s no stuff.”

Dan Sanchez

Dan Sanchez is the Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the editor-in chief of FEE.org.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Economist Adam Smith on This Day in History

This day in history: Adam Smith was born on this date in 1723. He wrote what many consider the Capitalist Bible, The Wealth of Nations, whose theme can be summed up by the following: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” In other words, the only reason you have food on the table is because someone acted selfishly. Someone provided a service, not because he likes you, but he simply wanted to remove you from your money and benefit himself. Despite this, the Capitalist free market system is still the best system we have. As Milton Friedman put it, "It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.”

From Lawrence W Reed:

The first ten days in the month of March 1776 brought forth momentous events that played roles in shaping the modern world.

The American Revolutionary War was not quite a year old. On March 2, American troops began shelling the British-occupied city of Boston. Two days later, they reclaimed Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston’s harbor, leading to the Brits’ evacuation of the city within a fortnight. Meanwhile in the South, militia from South Carolina and Georgia attacked a British fleet with fire ships in the Battle of the Rice Boats.

On March 3, American naval commodore Esek Hopkins took Nassau, Bahamas from the British in one of the first engagements of the fledgling American Navy and Marines.

Three thousand miles away in Edinburgh, Scotland on March 9, a professor published a new book in which he noted, “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.”

Of these various developments, which do you think produced the greatest long-term consequences?

Correct answer: It was the book with the dog revelation.

Taking Boston was a milestone but arguably, American colonists were sooner or later likely to gain independence regardless of the disposition of one town. The battle in the South was a minor skirmish. The Continental forces left Nassau and returned to Connecticut before month’s end. In the war between the Americans and the British, March came in like the proverbial lion but went out like the quiet lamb.

The book that appeared on March 9, however, was a barnburner. It was An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations by the moral philosopher Adam Smith. 245 years ago today, it made its debut. Economics has never been the same since.

In fact, before Smith, Economics wasn’t really much of a science of its own. Not every word in Smith’s book was new and original. Smith drew many ideas from previous thinkers much as, say, Murray Rothbard’s Man, Economy and State drew heavily from Mises, Menger, and more. But Smith pulled together some ideas of others, added many of his own, and presented it all in one comprehensive tome that earned him the title, “Father of Economics.”

The book wasn’t the last word on Economics and Smith didn’t get everything precisely right (who does?). A century later, for example, Austrian economists thoroughly demolished the labor theory of value which Smith (and the classical school) had mistakenly embraced.

Still, Smith’s insights were profound. He blew away the notion that society would be chaotic without the dictates of potentates, postulating a spontaneous order that arises from people constructively pursuing their self-interest. “In the great chessboard of human society,” he wrote, “every piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature chooses to impress upon it.”

A chapter devoted to Smith in my book, Real Heroes: Inspiring True Stories of Courage, Character and Conviction, notes,

The ideas of Adam Smith exerted enormous influence before he died in 1790 and especially in the 19th century. America’s Founders were greatly affected by his insights. The Wealth of Nations became required reading among men and women of ideas the world over. Until his day, no one had more thoroughly and convincingly blown away the intellectual edifice of big government than the professor from Kirkaldy. A tribute as much to him as to any other individual thinker, the world in 1900 was much freer and more prosperous than anyone imagined in 1776.

Any country that produced an enlightened giant like Adam Smith should be immensely and forever proud of it. But alas, the cancel culture has its knives out for him. In the land of his birth—Scotland—and in one of the cities where he wrote and taught—Edinburgh—a few misdirected malcontents are thinking about modifying or removing a statue of him on the Royal Mile.

Why? Not because Smith advocated slavery (he was a fierce opponent of it), but because he simply noted that the evil institution is historically ubiquitous.

How ironic! Small-minded, virtue-signaling activists—who will likely accomplish in their entire lifetimes but a fraction for liberty what Smith bestowed upon us in a single volume—want to bring the great man down. Shameful (and shameless) doesn’t begin to describe just the thought of it. Pray that such iniquity does not materialize.

This week in The Spectator, Matt Kilcoyne of the Adam Smith Institute provides the details. He writes,

To describe a process is not to condone it. It is perfectly consistent to argue that slavery is ‘ubiquitous and inevitable’ while wanting to see it curtailed in all its forms. Indeed, Smith was one of history’s greatest allies against slavery—and often quoted by abolitionists in popular anti-slavery literature.

Let’s mark the 245th anniversary of Adam Smith’s hugely influential work not by a senseless re-writing of history or the application of poisonous presentism to his legacy, but by a celebration of his contributions. We can start in that regard with a sample of his wisdom in his very own words:

_____

As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value, every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

_____

[M]an has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.

_____

The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

_____

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chessboard.

For additional information, see:

Presentism Imperils Our Future by Destroying Our Past by Lawrence W. Reed

Why Edinburgh’s Adam Smith Statue Should Stay by Matt Kilcoyne

Adam Smith: Ideas Change the World by Lawrence W. Reed

How Adam Smith Showed We Can Do Good by Doing Well by T. Norman Van Cott

What Adam Smith Can Teach Us About Being Lovely by Barry Brownstein

Adam Smith’s Three Moral Principles for Navigating our National Crisis by Caroline Breashears

Adam Smith on What It Means to Flourish by Ryan Patrick Hanley

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. Reed is FEE's President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty, having served for nearly 11 years as FEE’s president (2008-2019). He is author of the 2020 book, Was Jesus a Socialist? as well as Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction and Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism. Follow on LinkedIn and Like his public figure page on Facebook. His website is www.lawrencewreed.com.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Buy: The Folly of Socialism (40 Chapters) for 99 cents on Amazon

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Crackpot Economist John Maynard Keynes on This Day in History

Listen to: Keynesianism Flattened

This Day in History: British economist, John Maynard Keynes died on this day in 1946. His Kenyesian economic theory can perhaps be summarized in 7 words: "governments should spend money they don't have." His greatest work was "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money." Richard M. Ebeling wrote of this book: "Few books, in so short a time, have gained such wide influence and generated so destructive an impact on public policy. What Keynes succeeded in doing was to provide a rationale for what governments always like to do: spend money and pander to special interests... Keynes’s legacy has given us paper-money inflation, government deficit spending, and more political intervention throughout the market." 

"Keynes became the most famous economist of the 20th century and the guru-crank whose work has inspired thousands of failed economic experiments and continues to inspire them today. He is the Svengali-like figure who implausibly convinced the world that saving is bad, inflation cures unemployment, investment can and should be socialized, consumers are fools whose interests should be dismissed, and capital can be made non-scarce by driving interest rates to zero – thereby turning the hard work of many hundreds of years by economists on its head."~Lew Rockwell

The trillions of dollars in debt we now find ourselves in is the legacy of John Maynard Keynes, and at some point there has to be a reckoning. Keynes was not concerned with the future consequences of his policies, because, as he says: “In the long run we are all dead.”

In an earlier work, Keynes knew of the dangers of his economic system. In an earlier work of his, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" he wrote, "Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some."

See also The History & Mystery of Money & Economics-250 Books on DVDrom

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Where Keynesianism Goes Wrong

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Economist Friedrich Hayek on This Day in History

 

This day in history: Economist Friedrich Hayek died on this day in 1992. Hayek wrote the economics classic, The Road to Serfdom, which "[warns] of the danger of tyranny that inevitably results from government control of economic decision-making through central planning." [i.e Socialism] 

Listen to The Road to Serfdom

Milton Friedman said of The Road to Serfdom, "This profound book was highly influential in the immediate post-World War II period when it was a lone voice presenting the case for libertarian philosophy and pointing out the consequences of an increase in the role of the state. It was certainly one of the most effective works leading people to take libertarian principles seriously."

Hayek was especially hard on economists: "When Friedrich Hayek won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1974, he embarrassed many economists by noting their failures. Speaking in the midst of a great inflation that caused a greater loss of stock-market wealth in the U.S. than the Great Depression, he noted that the inflation was 'brought about by policies which the majority of economists recommended and even urged governments to pursue.' He added, 'We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: As a profession, we have made a mess of things.'"

It's interesting that Governments always seem to choose the wrong "experts."

My favorite quote from Hayek is “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine the can design.”

Buy this book: The Folly of Socialism (40 Chapters) for 99 cents on Amazon

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Economic Humorist & Storyteller Frederic Bastiat on This Day in History

The Law, by Bastiat

This Day In History: Economist Frederic Bastiat was born on this day in 1801. Economics is often called the "Dismal Science" but this became less so with Bastiat often injecting humor into it. Robert Heilbroner writes in his "Worldly Philosophers": "There was...a man who has been almost forgotten in the march of economic ideas. He is Frederic Bastiat, an eccentric Frenchman, who lived from 1801 to 1850, and who in that short space of time and an even shorter space of literary life—six years—brought to bear on economics that most devastating of all weapons: ridicule...Bastiat had a gift for pointing out absurdities; his little book Economic Sophisms is as close to humor as economics has ever come." For instance, in his Candlemakers’ Petition he wrote of candlemakers petitioning the Government to help them combat their enemy the sun, as sunlight was hurting their business.

"If a posthumous Nobel Prize were to be awarded to just one person for crystal-clear writing and masterful storytelling in economics, no one would be more deserving of it than Bastiat. Here is the great pity of his short time on this earth: while he lived and ever since, his own country never possessed the collective wisdom to give him the honor and attention he deserved. His selfless courage in expressing timeless, irrefutable truths while almost all around him wallowed in fallacy constitutes a great moral victory indeed."~Lawrence W. Reed

He was also one of the earliest opponents of Socialism. “Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.” 

Buy: And the Word was a god: A New Book on the Most Disputed Text in the New Testament - John 1:1  and The Dark History of the Trinity, is now available on Amazon by clicking here...and both are only 99 cents

Other great quips from Bastiat: “The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” 

“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?” 

“When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will.” 

“When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.” 

“The most urgent necessity is, not that the State should teach, but that it should allow education. All monopolies are detestable, but the worst of all is the monopoly of education.” 

“The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.” 

“Legal plunder has two roots: One of them, as I have said before, is in human greed; the other is in false philanthropy.” 

“The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.” 

Download the Bastiat Collection here

Bastiat- The Broken Window Fallacy

In his essay, That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen, Bastiat introduced the parable of the broken window to illustrate why destruction, and the money spent to recover from destruction, is not actually a net benefit to society.

See also The History & Mystery of Money & Economics-250 Books to download

The History and Mystery of Alchemy is now available on Amazon...and it is only 99 cents.

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Books Scanned from the Originals into PDF format

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Books are in the public domain. I will take checks or money orders as well.

Contents: 

The Wealth of Nations, Volume 1 by Adam Smith 1910

The Wealth of Nations, Volume 2 by Adam Smith 1910

The Wealth of Nations, Abridged, 1884 (Students Edition)

The Rothschilds - the Financial rulers of nations by John Reeves 1887

A Treatise on Political Economy by Jean Baptiste Say 1830

The Dismal Science, a Criticism on Modern English Political Economy by William Dillon 1882

Social Value - a study in economic theory, critical and constructive by Benjamin Anderson 1911

The Value of Money by Benjamin Anderson 1917

Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Volume 1 by Charles Mackay 1850

Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Volume 2 by Charles Mackay 1850

Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Volume 3 by Charles Mackay 1850 (a classic work that discusses the Tulip Bubble in the 17th century)

Man, Money, and the Bible - Biblical Economics by John R Allen 1891

Unto this Last & other Essays on art and Political Economy by John Ruskin 1907

Principles of political economy by Thomas Malthus 1821

An Essay on the Principle of Population, Volume 1 by Thomas Malthus 1817

An Essay on the Principle of Population, Volume 2 by Thomas Malthus 1817

An Essay on the Principle of Population, Volume 3 by Thomas Malthus 1817

The Coins of the Bible and its Monetary Terms by James R Snowden 1864

The Money of the Bible by George C Williamson 1894

Capital and Interest, a critical history of economical theory by Eugen Von Bahm-Bawerk 1890

Karl Marx and the Close of His System by Eugen Von Bahm-Bawerk 1898

Lombard Street, a description of the Money Market by Walter Bagehot 1920

The Principles of Economics with applications to practical problems by Frank A Fetter 1904

Source book in Economics by Frank A Fetter 1913

Principles of economics, Volume 1 by Alfred Marshall

Elements of Economics of Industry 1 by Alfred Marshall 

Industry and Trade by Alfred Marshall 1920

Capital by Karl Marx 1904

Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx 1906

Political Economy, by Simonde de Sismondi, 1847

An Inquiry into the Principles of political Economy by Sir James Steuart, Volume 1, 1767

An Inquiry into the Principles of political Economy by Sir James Steuart, Volume 2, 1767

A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Economical Tracts (Defoe, Elking, Franklin, Turgot, Anderson, Schomberg, Townsend, Burke, Bell) 1859

Principles of Political Economy with some of their applications to social philosophy by John Stuart Mill 1920

An Introduction to the Theory of Value on the lines of Menger, Wieser, and Bohm-Bawerk by William Smart 1891

Belgian Democracy by Henri Pirenne 1915

The Works of David Ricardo 1888

The principles of political economy & taxation by David Ricardo 1912

Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy by John Stuart Mill 1874

On the Concept of Social Value by Joseph Schumpeter 1909

Socialism and the social movement by Werner Sombart 1909

Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy 1917 (the classic fictional story of Julian West, a young American who, towards the end of the 19th century, falls into a deep, hypnosis-induced sleep and wakes up 113 years later. He finds himself in the same location but in a totally changed [Socialistic] world)

The People's Marx (Abridged version of Capital) 1921

The Marxian Economic Handbook and Glossary by WH Emmett 1922

The Political Theories of P.J. Proudhon by Shi Yung Lu 1922

What is Property, By Pierre Joseph Proudhon 1840

The State - Its Nature, Object, and Destiny By Pierre Joseph Proudhon 1849

The Vatican - its History, its Treasures by Ernesto Begni 1914

The Tithe in Scripture by Henry Landsdell 1908

Mediaeval Socialism by Jarrett Bede 1914

An Introductory Lecture on Political Economy by Nassau William Senior 1827

Three lectures on the rate of wages by Nassau William Senior 1830

The engineers and the price system by Thorstein Veblen 1921

The Theory of the Leisure Class, an economic study of institutions by Thorstein Veblen 1918

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber 1920

The Physiocrats, 6 lectures on the French économistes of the 18th century by Henry Higgs 1897

The Gentle Art of Train Robbery by Jack Comegys 1905

Professional Criminals of America by Thomas Byrnes 1886

Economic History of the United States by Ernest L Bogart 1914

Economic History of England by M Briggs 1914

The Theory and History of Banking by Charles Dunbar 1922

Train and Bank Robbers of the Wild West 1889

True History of the so-called £1,000,000 Forgery, the bank duped: how the impregnable Bank of England showered its bags of gold on George Bidwell

The Economic Interpretation of History by Edwin Seligman 1902

Guild Socialism by Niles Carpenter 1922

The Case for Capitalism by Hartley Whithers 1920

Both Sides of the Tariff Question by the world's leading men 1890

Protectionism, the -ism which teaches that waste makes wealth by William Graham Sumner 1885

History of Economic Thought by Lewis Haney 1922

The Evolution of Modern Capitalism by JA Hobson 1907

The Roosevelt Panic of 1907 By Adolph Edwards 1907

The Causes of the Panic of 1893 by W. Jett Lauck 1907

A Short History of Coins and Currency by Sir John Lubbock 1902

United States Notes - a History of the various issues of paper money by the Government of the United States by John Jay Knox 1899

The Gold Standard by Gold standard defence association 1898

The Gold Standard: its causes, its effects, and its future by Wilhelm von Kardorff-Wabnitz 1880

New View Of Society by Robert Owen 1813

Letters to Malthus on Political Economy by Jean Baptiste Say 1821

Elements of Political Economy by James Mill 1826

Overproduction and Crises by Johann Karl Rodbertus 1908

General Theory of Political Economy by William Stanley Jevons 1886

Imperialism - A Study by John A Hobson 1902

Dictionary of Political Economy, Volume 1 by Sir Robert Palgrave 1915

Dictionary of Political Economy, Volume 2 by Sir Robert Palgrave 1915

Dictionary of Political Economy, Volume 3 by Sir Robert Palgrave 1915

Economic interpretation of history by James E Rogers 1888

Economic Determinism by Lida Parce 1913

The philosophy of wealth by John Bates Clark 1894

Principles of the economic philosophy of society, government and industry by Van Buren Denslow 1888

History of economics by Joseph Dewe 1908

Jesus an Economic Mediator bA treatise on political economy; (1830)y James Darby 1922

On the Principles of Political Economy by David Ricardo 1821

Outline of Economic by Richard Ely 1918

Political Economy For Beginners by MG Fawcett 1911

The Austrian Economists and their View of Value, article in the Journal of Economics 1889

Popular fallacies regarding trade by Frederic Bastiat 1882

Fallacies of protection by Frederic Bastiat 1909

Popular Fallacies Regarding General Interests by Frederic Bastiat 1849

An Introduction to the Study of Political Economy by Luigi Cossa 1893

The cause of business depressions as disclosed by an analysis of the basic principles of economics by Hugo Bilgram 1914

The federal reserve system by Henry Parker Willis 1920

The Federal reserve monster by Sam Clark 1922

The economics of socialism by HM Hyndman 1921

The economics of Herbert Spencer by Owen William 1891

LIBERTY AND TAXATION by Benjamin Tucker

Calumet K

This 1901 book is the story of one man's ingenuity, perseverance and struggle in the construction of a grain elevator and of his exhilarating triumph.

Ayn Rand considered this her favorite novel, and wrote that "it has one element that I have never found in any other novel: the portrait of an efficacious man."

Political Economy For Beginners by MG Fawcett 1900

The Austrian Economists, article in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 1890

Facts and figures, the basis of economic science by E Atkinson 1904

The Case against Protection by E Cooke 1909

Fair trade unmasked by the Cobden Club 1887

Principles of Scientific Management by Frederick Winslow Taylor 1911

Inflation by J Shield Nicholson 1919 (The Abandonment of the Gold Standard During the War)

How the Federal Reserve was Evolved by 5 Men in Jekyl Island, article in the Current Opinion 1916

An Economic History of Rome by Tenney Frank 1920

Currency inflation and public debts by Edwin Seligman 1921

Fiat Money Inflation in France, how it came, what it brought and how it ended by Andrew Dickson White 1914

A Brief History of Pawnbroking by Alfred Hardaker 1892

Sound Money Monographs by William C Cornwell 1897 (Should Government Retire from Banking?, Gold Standard etc)

The History of Money in America by Alexander Del Mar 1899

The Science of Money by Alexander Del Mar 1899

Lorenzo de Medici and Florence in the 15th century by Edward Armstrong 1908

The Elements of the Science of Money by John Prince Smith 1813

Historical Summary of Metallic Money by Robert N Toppan 1884

The Mississippi Bubble: a Memoir of John Law by Adolphe Tiers 1859

John Law of Lauriston, Financier and Statesman, founder of the Bank of France, originator of the Mississippi Scheme by AW Wiston-Glynn 1907

The Financial Philosophy - The Principles of the science of money by George Wilson 1895

The Economic Principles of Confucius by Chen Huan-Chang 1911

The Law of Oresme, Copernicus, and Gresham by Thomas W Balch 1908

The Life Story of J. Pierpont Morgan by Carl Hovey 1911

Bulls and Bears of New York: With the Crisis of 1873 by Matthew Hale Smith - 1874

Economic Essays by Charles F Dunbar 1904 (Economic science in America, 1776-1876, The reaction in political economy, Ricardo's use of facts, Some precedents followed by Alexander Hamilton, The direct tax of 1861, The new income tax, Early banking Schemes in England, The bank of Venice etc)

My Adventures with Your Money by George Graham Rice 1913 (Dedicated to: To The American Damphool Speculator, surnamed the American Sucker, otherwise described herein as The Thinker - Who Thinks He Knowsi But Doesn't - Greetings. This book is for you! Read as you run, and may you run as you read.)

A History of Banking in all the Leading Nations, Volume 1 by William Graham Sumner 1896

A History of Banking in all the Leading Nations, Volume 2 by William Graham Sumner 1896

A History of Banking in all the Leading Nations, Volume 3 by William Graham Sumner 1896

A History of Banking in all the Leading Nations, Volume 4 by William Graham Sumner 1896

Coins & Medals as Aids to the Study and Verification of Holy Writ by Stanley Clark Bagg 1863

Mohammedan (Islamic) Theories of Finance by Nicolas P Aghnides 1916

Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie 1920

The Gospel of Wealth by Andrew Carnegie 1901

The Rise and Progress of the Standard Oil Company by Gilbert H Montague 1903

Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by himself, Including his golden rules for Money-making 1888

The Story of Money - A Science Hand-book of Money Questions by E.C. Towne 1900

Gold and Silver as Currency - in the light of experience, historical, economical, and practical by James G Patterson 1896

Bimetallism -  a summary and examination of the arguments for and against a bimetallic (Gold and Silver) system of currency by Leonard Darwin 1898

Monetary Economics by William W Carlile 1912

Economic method and economic fallacies by William W Carlile 1904

Monetary and industrial fallacies by John B Howe 1878

Abraham Lincoln - Protectionist 1916

Financial History of the United States by Davis R Dewey 1920

The Gilded Age by Mark Twain 1873

Acres of Diamonds by Russell Conwell 1915

My Life and Work by Henry Ford 1922

Way to Wealth by Benjamin Franklin 1814

The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracián y Morales 1904

Pushing to the Front - Success under difficulties by Orison S Marden 1911

Paper against Gold - the Mystery of the Bank of England of the debt of the stocks of the sinking fund and of all the other tricks and contrivances carried on by the means of paper money by William Cobbett 1846

Legal Tender, a study in English and American Monetary History by Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge, 1903

Great Britain in the latest Age, from laisser faire to State Control by AS Turberville 1921

The Story of Modern Progress by Willis M West 1920

The Struggle for Bread by Victor W Germains 1913

The Corner in Gold - Its History and Theory by FW Bain 1893

History of the Terrible Financial Panic of 1873

The History of Currency, 1252 to 1894 by William Arthur Shaw 1895 

A History of Commerce by Clive Day 1916

A History of the Precious Metals by Alexander Del Mar 1902

History of Monetary Systems, record of actual experiments in money made by various states of the ancient and modern world by Alexander Del Mar 1895

Paper Money, the money of civilization by James Harvey 1877

Money and Civilization by Alexander Del Mar 1886

The Mystery of Money Explained By James Taylor 1862

Tendencies in American Economic Thought By Sidney Sherwood 1897

The Economics of Laissez Faire by Harris Gilbert Franklin 1920

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx 1904

Economic Liberalism by Hermanm Levy 1913 (keep in mind that 100 years ago "Liberalism" had a more libertarian [Laissez Faire] definition)

The Industrial Revolution by Charles Beard 1919

Marxian (Karl Marx) Economics by Karl Untermann 1911

The Remarkable History of the Hudson's Bay Company by George Bryce - 1900

Paper Money, the Root of Evil by Charles A. Mann - 1872

Benjamin Franklin as an Economist by WA Wetzel 1895

Contributions of Alchemy to Numismatics by Henry Carrington Bolton 1890

Economics for the People - Plain Talks on Economics by RR Bowker 1892

Economics for Beginners by Henry Dunning Macleod 1879

Political Economy for Beginners by Millicent Garrett Fawcett 1911

Antiquity of Coins by William Hume 1856

The President and the Motto on our Coins 1908 (In God We Trust)

Psychology of the Stock Market by GC Selden 1912

The Pitfalls of Speculation by Thomas Gibson 1916

Wall Street Speculation, its Tricks and its Tragedies by Francis C Keyes 1904

Betting and gambling by Seton Churchill 1894

Gambling (Fortuna) -The True Philosophy and Ethics of Gambling by James H Romain 1891

The New Philosophy of Money by Alfred B Westrup 1895

The Financial Philosophy - The Principles of the Science of Money by George Wilson 1895

The Mercantile System and Its Historical Significance by Gustav von Schmoller 1896

History of American Socialisms by George Noyes 1870 ("The only laudable object any one can have in rehearsing and studying the histories of the socialistic failures, is that of learning from them practical lessons for guidance in present and future experiments.")

Lectures against Socialism 1840

Economics and Socialism by Frederick Uttley Laycock 1895

Marxian Economics by Ernest Untermann - 1907

The Fallacy of Marx's Theory of Surplus-value by Henry Seymour - 1897

The Economic Theory of Risk and Insurance by Alan Herbert Willett - 1901

The Profits of Religon by Upton Sinclair 1918

Introduction to Economics by Alvin Saunders Johnson 1909

Introduction to Economics by John R Turner 1919

The Economics of Laissez Faire by Harris Gilbert Franklin 1920

History of the Great American Fortunes, Volume 1 by Gustavus Myers 1910

History of the Great American Fortunes, Volume 2 by Gustavus Myers 1910

History of the Great American Fortunes, Volume 3 by Gustavus Myers 1910

Great Riches by Charles William Eliot 1906

Inspired Millionaires; an Interpretation of America by Gerald Stanley Lee 1908

The Money God - Chapters of Heresy and Dissent Concerning Business Methods and Mercenary ideals in American Life by John C Van Dyke 1908

The Things that are Caesar's - a Defense of Wealth by Guy M Walker 1922

American Individualism by Herbert Hoover 1922

A Study of John D. Rockefeller: The Wealthiest Man in the World by Marcus Monroe Brown 1905

The Masters of Capital - a Chronicle of Wall Street by John Moody 1919

Men who are making America by BC Forbes 1917

John D. Rockefeller and his Career by Silas Hubbard 1904

Random Reminiscences of Men and Events by John D. Rockefeller 1909

Famous American Fortunes and the men who Have Made Them by Laura C Holloway 1889

The Life of George Peabody by Phebe A Hanaford 1870

The Gospel of Wealth by Andrew Carnegie - 1901

The Life of James J. Hill - Volume 1 by Joseph Gilpin Pyle - 1917

The Life of James J. Hill - Volume 2 by Joseph Gilpin Pyle - 1917 (James J. Hill built the Great Northern Railroad without any government aid, even the right of way, through hundreds of miles of public lands, being paid for in cash)

Hidden Treasures - Why some Succeed while others Fail by Harry A Lewis 1887

The Vanderbilts and the Story of Their Fortune by WA Croffut 1886

The Life and Ventures of the original John Jacob Astor by Elizabeth Gebhard 1915

Life of John Jacob Astor by James Parton 1865

Men and Mysteries of Wall Street by James K Medbery 1870

Some Successful Americans by Sherman Williams 1904

The Age of Big Business - a Chronicle of the Captains of Industry by Burton J Hendrick 1920

The Life story of J. Pierpont Morgan by Carl Hovey 1911

Millionaires and Kings of Enterprise by James Burnley 1901

Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie 1920

The Rise and Progress of the Standard Oil Company by Gilbert H Montague 1903

Bulls and Bears of New York by William Hale Smith 1874

Financial History of the United States by Davis R Dewey 1920

America at Work by John F Fraser 1903

The Model T Ford Car by Victor W Page 1915

Industrial History of the United States by Louis Ray Wells 1922

The Economic History of the United States by Ernest Ludlow Bogart 1914

The Industrial Evolution of the United States by Carroll D Wright 1901

Captains of Industry by James Parton 1896

The Oil-well Driller: A History of the World's Greatest Enterprise By Charles Austin Whiteshot 1905

The Story of Oil by Walter S Tower 1909

The Carnegie Millions and the Men who Made Them - being the inside history of the Carnegie Steel Company by James H Bridge 1903

The Romance of Steel - the Story of a Thousand Millionaires by Herbert N Casson 1907

Life of Jay Gould, how he Made his Millions by Murat Halstead 1892

Wizard of Wall Street and his Wealth - The Life and Deeds of Jay Gould by Trumbull White 1893 

Financial Giants of America, Volume 1 by George F Redmond, 1922

Financial Giants of America, Volume 2 by George F Redmond, 1922

American Millionaires 1892

The Great Industries of the United States by Horace Greeley 1872

Jacob Henry Schiff - A Biographical Sketch 1921

Men of Business by William O Stoddard 1893

Readings in the Economic History of the United States by Ernest Lublow Bogart 1917

The Story of Bethlehem Steel by Arundel Cotter 1916

For a list of all of my books, with links click here