All Posts Tagged With: "American history"
The Unitary Executive: Presidential Power from Washington to Bush
Steven G. Calabresi and Christopher S. Yoo count as founding fathers of the much-debated unitary executive theory (UET), which they named in 1992. In this large book they argue that every American president has subscribed to the theory, and that along with constitutional text and structure, this continuous presidential practice makes the law. Briefly, UET [...]
18Nov2009 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Founders, the Constitution, and the Historians
How could Charles Beard have erred so badly in arguing that the Constitution was written mainly to serve the signers’ economic interests? In part Beard missed the mark because he was trying to hit something else—a Progressive agenda for reform, the excuse to transfer wealth from the haves to the have-nots. If the Founders were merely protecting their economic interests, Beard and his progressive friends were justified in supporting the redistribution of wealth.
11Jun2009 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 17 comments | ContinuedLost Articles
The Constitution says that to be elected to the U.S. Senate, a person has to be 30 or older, a citizen for at least nine years, and a resident of the state from which the candidate is elected. Alas, it says nothing about knowing American history. Good thing for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). He’d have [...]
26Jan2007 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedQuasi-Corporatism: America’s Homegrown Fascism
Full-fledged corporatism, as a system for organizing the formulation and implementation of economic policies, requires the replacement of political representation according to area of residence by political representation according to position in the socioeconomic division of labor. The citizen of a corporate state has a political identity not as a resident of a particular geographical [...]
1Jan2006 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedSelling History with Dolls
Many people think that markets can’t provide culture. History, for example, has to be supported through government-funded schools, endowments, and grants. In this view, markets can only destroy history: shopping-mall developers want to build on historic battlefields; priceless historic items wind up on eBay selling to collectors with piles of money but too little taste [...]
1May2003 | Andrew P. Morriss | 1 comment | ContinuedWhat’s Wrong with How We Teach Economics
Brandon Crocker is a real estate executive in San Diego. The decline in the core curricula of universities and the growing “cultural illiteracy” of high school and college graduates have been lamented in many books and articles. As universities have redesigned their curricula to fit the demands of political correctness and the particular interests of [...]
1May2003 | Brandon Crocker | 0 comments | ContinuedExperiment in Liberty by William Moore Gray III
Sunflower University Press • 1998 • 388 pages • $34.95 Experiment in Liberty is an experiment by a certified public accountant in writing a history of the United States. It is sometimes a flawed experiment and often idiosyncratic in organization; but this book is nonetheless more reliable than most texts now being used in high-school [...]
1Feb2000 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 0 comments | ContinuedA History of the American People by Paul Johnson
HarperCollins Publishers • 1998 • 1,088 pages • $35.00 “The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures. No other national story has such tremendous lessons, for the American people and for the rest of mankind.” So begins Paul Johnson in his upbeat and first-rate A History of the [...]
1Mar1999 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 0 comments | ContinuedKnowledge and Decisions
Ms. Shaw is a senior associate at PERC in Bozeman, Montana. Physicists tell us that a solid rock is mostly empty space interspersed with occasional dense specks of matter. “In much the same way,” says Thomas Sowell, “specks of knowledge are scattered through a vast emptiness of ignorance, and everything depends upon how solid the [...]
1May1996 | Jane S. Shaw | 1 comment | Continued-
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