Our Economic Past

Regime Uncertainty, Then and Now

In a 1997 article, “Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed After the War”, I advanced the idea of regime uncertainty in an attempt to improve our understanding of the Great Depression’s extraordinary duration and of the highly successful postwar transition to a genuinely prosperous market-oriented economy. The idea [...]

4Jan2012 | Robert Higgs | 4 comments | Continued

The First Government Bailouts: The Story of the RFC

The idea of using federal money to bail out large failing corporations did not begin with the Bush administration. In the beginning was the RFC, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which President Herbert Hoover pretentiously named and bountifully funded during the Great Depression to bail out corporations deemed too big to fail. In 1932 Congress gave [...]

30Nov2011 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 1 comment | Continued

The Other Test: Debts and Taxes

States and polities—or rather the ruling classes that control them—face two great tests in the course of history. Failure to meet them typically leads to disaster and even the dissolution of the State. The first and most familiar is war, armed conflict with other States (or more accurately, other ruling groups). By analogy wars can [...]

26Oct2011 | Stephen Davies | 0 comments | Continued

The Great Society’s War on Poverty

For the most part President Lyndon B. Johnson was simply lucky in regard to economic stability and growth during his term in office, although he does deserve credit for pushing John F. Kennedy’s stalled tax-cut proposal to quick enactment in February 1964. The economy was already growing and the rate of unemployment declining when LBJ [...]

21Sep2011 | Robert Higgs | 7 comments | Continued

The Myth of U.S. Prosperity during World War II

World War II, the so-called Good War, has been a fount of historical fallacies. One of the greatest—and one of the most pernicious for subsequent policymakers—is the notion that prosperity prevailed during the war. Although Americans might have been dying in the Pacific and European theaters of war, people on the home front actually benefited [...]

8Sep2011 | Robert Higgs | 2 comments | Continued

Which Strategy Really Ended the Great Depression?

“World War II got us out of the Great Depression.” Many people said that during the war, and some still do today. The quality of American life, however, was precarious during the war. Food was rationed, luxuries removed, taxes high, and work dangerous. A recovery that does not make—as Robert Higgs points out in Depression, [...]

24Aug2011 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 6 comments | Continued

The Virtues of Commerce: Lessons from Japan

One of the great questions of historical inquiry, which I have addressed in these pages and elsewhere, is exactly how the modern world came to be so different from what went before. Since about 1750 there has been a 16-fold increase in real wealth per capita on a global scale, something completely unprecedented that has [...]

22Jun2011 | Stephen Davies | 2 comments | Continued

Economic Analysis and the Great Society

Although the Great Society should be understood as primarily a political phenomenon—a vast conglomeration of government policies and actions based on political stances and objectives—economists and economic analysis played important supporting roles in the overall drama. Even when political actors could not have cared less about economic analysis, they were usually at pains to cloak [...]

25May2011 | Robert Higgs | 5 comments | Continued

The Progressive Income Tax and the Joy of Spending Other People’s Money

On August 31, 1910, Teddy Roosevelt traveled to Kansas to make a stirring speech in support of a federal income tax. “The really big fortune,” Roosevelt said, “the swollen fortune by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men [...]

21Apr2011 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 5 comments | Continued

Maps and Power

The modern world (meaning since the later eighteenth century) is different in several profound ways from earlier times. One of the most important of these is the nature and power of government. Modern States can do things beyond the reach of earlier ones, however large or aggressive. This expanded capacity is a feature of modern [...]

23Mar2011 | Stephen Davies | 0 comments | Continued

Ideological and Political Underpinnings of the Great Society

The surge of federal economic interventions that occurred during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency—the much-ballyhooed Great Society, whose centerpiece was the War on Poverty—differed from the four preceding surges, each of which had been sparked by war or economic depression. No national emergency prevailed when Johnson took office following John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, [...]

24Feb2011 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | Continued

Freeman articles on American Presidents

Selected from The Freeman Archives: Our Presidents and the National Debt, By Burton Folsom During the last 75 years the United States has failed to balance its annual budget over 90 percent of the time. What’s worse, the government has spent money so recklessly that we now owe over $8.2 trillion, and Congress recently raised [...]

17Feb2011 | Tsvetelin M. Tsonevski | 1 comment | Continued

Andrew Higgins: Boat Builder of WWII

Who was Andrew Higgins? Almost forgotten now, he was, according to Dwight Eisenhower, “the man who won [World War II] for us.” As General William T. Sherman observed, “War is hell.” That hell includes oppressive taxes, loss of freedom, and crushing debt, as well as deaths in combat. But once in war, as the United [...]

22Dec2010 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 7 comments | Continued

Lessons from the Scottish Enlightenment

Among the many aspects of the modern world invented in Scotland, we may include the discipline of economics—indeed, the contemporary social sciences in general. In the latter half of the eighteenth century a whole congregation of brilliant intellects appeared in this small country on the edge of Europe and articulated profound insights into what we [...]

24Nov2010 | Stephen Davies | 6 comments | Continued

America’s Depression within a Depression, 1937–39

The Great Depression in the United States is generally dated as beginning in 1929 and ending in 1941, give or take a year. This has led many commentators to disregard or to pass quickly over the serious depression that began in 1937 and ended—if returning to the 1937 level can be considered a depression’s end—in [...]

22Oct2010 | Robert Higgs | 8 comments | Continued

Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressive Vision of History

Over a hundred years ago, on August 31, 1910, Teddy Roosevelt gave his famous “New Nationalism” speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. In that speech the former president projected his vision for how the federal government could regulate the American economy. He defended the government’s expansion during his presidency and suggested new ways that it could promote [...]

22Sep2010 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 8 comments | Continued

The Economic Way of Thinking Makes a Comeback

As readers of this magazine know, its main goal, and that of FEE as a whole, is economic education—that is, to explain and spread essential economic insights so more people become familiar with the “economic way of thinking,” as Israel Kirzner called it. This brings insight to politics, society, and history. Above all, it gives [...]

25Aug2010 | Stephen Davies | 2 comments | Continued
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