Lincoln’s Despotic Dream Mises Review 11, No. 2 (Summer 2005) WHAT LINCOLN BELIEVED: THE VALUES AND CONVICTIONS OF AMERICA’S GREATEST PRESIDENT Michael Lind Doubleday, 2005, 358 pgs. Michael Lind’s study of Lincoln illustrates the old saying, “God protect me from my friends; from my enemies I can defend myself.” He maintains that Lincoln
The most significant recent development in the study of economic history has been the investigation of the profitability of American slavery made famous in Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross . Their book not only rewrote the history of antebellum slavery, it ushered in a completely new methodology of economic history: the
While studying colonial period business practices and property rights issues, for a business & finance history class, I read Carl Watner’s Libertarians and Indians: Proprietary Justice & Aboriginal Land Rights , in a 1983 issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. Watner smartly refutes the thesis that states, as Roderick Long puts it , “given
I was particularly moved by this passage from Thomas DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln (also available from Amazon.com), reviewed here by David Gordon. DiLorenzo is one of the few people to take an honest look at Lincoln, instead of treating him like a saint and making excuses for his atrocities. This passage is from the chapter, Was Lincoln a
The modern American Right began, in the 1930’s and 1940’s, as a reaction against the New Deal and the Roosevelt Revolution, and specifically as an opposition to the critical increase of statism and state intervention at home, and to war and state intervention abroad. The guiding motif of what we might call the “old American Right” was a deep and
This year is the bicentennial of the birth of Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the most famous political commentators about America. Although not always a consistent thinker, he stands squarely in the classical liberal tradition of understanding the capacity of society to self organize in the absence of a controlling central state. Charles Eliot
Starting this year, every educational institution receiving federal aid must teach about the U.S. Constitution on the September 17 anniversary of its signing (September 16 in 2005, as the 17th is a Saturday). The requirement is ironic, given that it came from the Senate’s leading Constitutional scholar, yet clearly conflicts with the Constitution,
Mitchell Anderson’s article, “End of cheap oil is a blessing,” attacks the widespread outrage over the unusually high gas prices of recent months. Anderson mixes three parts economic fallacy with two parts condemnation of government absurdities, and adds a dash of fervent environmentalism. The result is a hilarious (or infuriating, depending on
The literature on free banking has sharply altered its focus in the last two decades. While the alleged failures of free banking have been closely analyzed and shown to have been greatly exaggerated, the link to fractional-reserve banking has been missed in the literature so far. Volume 9, Number 1 (1996) Rashid, Salim. “Portfolio Management of
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.