History
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The Academic Voldemort Principle
It’s fundamentally a case of academic misconduct — of denying another due credit for their work, or preventing that work from even entering the conversation as you simultaneously attempt to rationalize confining your opponents to the territory of “he who shall not be named.”
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Joseph A. Schumpeter, Outsider Looking In
All of Joseph Schumpeter’s writings are “a splendid excursion down the river of time, with good talk and magnificent vistas” – and as such he remains, in many ways, one of those timeless and uniquely thought-provoking contributors to economics.
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Who Is the Real Alexander Hamilton?
What Hamilton did not do as treasury secretary is implement, or espouse, any system of protective tariffs or bounties.
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The Soviet Economy Was Not Growing; It Was Dying
Warren Nutter’s assessment was no abstraction, but rather the result of years of close study of the relationship between state policy and industrial concentration in the United States – the subject of his dissertation at the University of Chicago.
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If Libertarianism Hollowed Out, Why?
Becoming a libertarian doesn’t mean leaving your humanity behind; on the contrary, it means embracing it fully and believing that the potential of a free life on earth is far from fully realized.
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Five Great and Recent Books on Economic History
The field of economic history is a hard one to dabble in. It requires the assembly of rich and complex data from the past. Unlike modern statistical series, there are no “user guides” for economists and historians who deal with past data. One must simply absorb large quantities of detail to make things as simple…
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The 1619 Project Debate: A Bibliography
As the debate over the New York Times’ 1619 Project continues, it is helpful to have a list of resources that encompass the project’s contents and criticisms of the same. What follows below is a bibliographic reference to each, which I will also periodically update as new commentary becomes available. I make no specific endorsements…
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The Year in Bad Ideas
The Green New Deal. Hipster Antitrust. Breaking Up Big Tech. Protectionism. Billionaire Tears. New Tech, Old Jobs. Bitcoin Maximalism. Don’t Inhale That. Elizabeth Warren. National Conservatism.
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My Most Notable Articles of 2019
How Capitalist Abolitionists Fought Slavery This was my favorite piece to write over the last year because it explored a little-known historical episode in which the New York financier Lewis Tappan used market innovation to advance the abolition of slavery. I wrote it in part to respond to the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which…
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Those Shepherds Abiding in the Fields Were Private Security Workers
People talk like capitalism is some strange foreign invader, a mechanical system that was imposed on the world a couple hundred years ago, fueled by burning coal and emitting smoke, and certainly not anything organic to the social order. This is preposterous. The Christmas story that surrounds us in this season, told millions of times…
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•
The Academic Voldemort Principle
It’s fundamentally a case of academic misconduct — of denying another due credit for their work, or preventing that work from even entering the conversation as you simultaneously attempt to rationalize confining your opponents to the territory of “he who shall not be named.”
-
•
Joseph A. Schumpeter, Outsider Looking In
All of Joseph Schumpeter’s writings are “a splendid excursion down the river of time, with good talk and magnificent vistas” – and as such he remains, in many ways, one of those timeless and uniquely thought-provoking contributors to economics.
-
•
Who Is the Real Alexander Hamilton?
What Hamilton did not do as treasury secretary is implement, or espouse, any system of protective tariffs or bounties.
-
•
The Soviet Economy Was Not Growing; It Was Dying
Warren Nutter’s assessment was no abstraction, but rather the result of years of close study of the relationship between state policy and industrial concentration in the United States – the subject of his dissertation at the University of Chicago.
-
•
If Libertarianism Hollowed Out, Why?
Becoming a libertarian doesn’t mean leaving your humanity behind; on the contrary, it means embracing it fully and believing that the potential of a free life on earth is far from fully realized.
-
•
Five Great and Recent Books on Economic History
The field of economic history is a hard one to dabble in. It requires the assembly of rich and complex data from the past. Unlike modern statistical series, there are no “user guides” for economists and historians who deal with past data. One must simply absorb large quantities of detail to make things as simple…
-
•
The 1619 Project Debate: A Bibliography
As the debate over the New York Times’ 1619 Project continues, it is helpful to have a list of resources that encompass the project’s contents and criticisms of the same. What follows below is a bibliographic reference to each, which I will also periodically update as new commentary becomes available. I make no specific endorsements…
-
•
The Year in Bad Ideas
The Green New Deal. Hipster Antitrust. Breaking Up Big Tech. Protectionism. Billionaire Tears. New Tech, Old Jobs. Bitcoin Maximalism. Don’t Inhale That. Elizabeth Warren. National Conservatism.
-
•
My Most Notable Articles of 2019
How Capitalist Abolitionists Fought Slavery This was my favorite piece to write over the last year because it explored a little-known historical episode in which the New York financier Lewis Tappan used market innovation to advance the abolition of slavery. I wrote it in part to respond to the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which…
-
•
Those Shepherds Abiding in the Fields Were Private Security Workers
People talk like capitalism is some strange foreign invader, a mechanical system that was imposed on the world a couple hundred years ago, fueled by burning coal and emitting smoke, and certainly not anything organic to the social order. This is preposterous. The Christmas story that surrounds us in this season, told millions of times…