Posted by Tom Woods on September 2nd, 2010 | No Comments »
This Saturday in Fort Worth we kick off the Nullify Now tour, which will force the indispensable idea of state nullification into the national consciousness by means of high-profile events in major cities. Next month it’s Orlando (featuring former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson) and Chattanooga, then in 2011 it’s Phoenix, Los Angeles, and other cities to be announced.
Be a part of this. And read the book that arms you with all the evidence you need to make the case for this Jeffersonian remedy against federal lawlessness.
Posted by Tom Woods on August 27th, 2010 | 3 Comments »
Here’s a reply I just wrote to an email asking me where a certain person got the idea that the economy was in recession 40% of the time in the nineteenth century. I am calling the person X, because he’s about the most uncharitable (and uncomprehending) antagonist I’ve ever faced — yes, even a genial guy like me has antagonists — and I’m all done dealing with him.
“I’d tell you where he gets it from, but my answer would be too crude. X is a real estate agent who knows as much about nineteenth-century economic history as any other real estate agent. (I am not saying real estate agents are ignorant, you understand, but that they tend not to be experts in this highly specialized area.) Yes, there were recessions, but contemporaries correctly blamed them on excessive issue of bank credit, often pushed by federally chartered national banks. Austrians oppose this kind of activity in the first place, so X proves nothing by citing these panics. Rothbard shows in his book The Panic of 1819 (Columbia University Press, 1962) that many people decided, in the wake of that panic, that the best policy was 100% reserve banking in a completely private system. We never got that. That system, say many Austrians, is the only one that would put a stop to the boom-bust cycle.
“X probably still believes in the ‘Long Depression’ of the 1870s. He and everyone else who hasn’t kept up with the literature. No professional economic historian believes that fable any longer. Heck, even the New York Timesadmits it was bogus. Rothbard nailed that one, too, way ahead of the rest of the profession (as usual), but we are not allowed to mention the wicked Rothbard except for purposes of distortion and ridicule. (The relevant material can be found in Rothbard’s posthumously released book A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II, which collects some of his writings on such subjects from over the years.)
“Yes, there were bank panics, but naturally X doesn’t consider (because he probably doesn’t know) how rare those panics were in other countries. Bank panics, says one historian, were a ‘curiosity’ elsewhere in the world after the Civil War, but fairly regular in the U.S. This is because of the free market, X probably thinks, though I’d love to hear his theory. In fact, it’s because of precisely the unit banking laws that his distributism would demand. To keep banks small and local — an effort that warms X’s heart — many states made it illegal for any bank to have more than one office. That made them all extremely fragile and undiversified. During the Great Depression, 9000 U.S. banks failed. In Canada, which had no unit banking laws, zero banks failed.
“Thus it was precisely the kind of ‘small is beautiful’ legislation X would fasten upon us that caused the problem in the first place.
“Funny, too, that X supports the Fed! He thinks the Fed has been a great stabilizer. This is because he knows nothing about nineteenth-century American economic history. The statistics that allegedly show greater economic instability in the 19th century are, as competent economists know, not worth a hill of beans. Christina Romer has shown this again and again. When you isolate how much of the instability was caused by monetary factors and how much by supply factors in an agricultural economy, it’s overwhelmingly the latter that’s the culprit in the 19th century. In the 20th century, on the other hand, the instability is overwhelmingly attributable to monetary factors.
“I say it’s funny that X supports the Fed because as a distributist shouldn’t he be against a nationwide banking cartel directed monopolistically by one institution? Just wondering.”
Posted by Tom Woods on August 26th, 2010 | No Comments »
With the exception of Ron Paul, this Iowa poll is an establishment fest. Oooh, you mean I might get a chance to vote for that great statesman Tim Pawlenty for the Republican nomination in 2012? How will I ever choose between Pawlenty and Rick Santorum? Or between deep thinkers Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee? After eight years of a GOP plastic man, I’ll scratch my head and wonder how such a “conservative” could have expanded the federal government so relentlessly. Oh, well — there will be more plastic men to choose from in 2020!
Posted by Tom Woods on August 5th, 2010 | 3 Comments »
Not much activity around here lately because we have been (and indeed still are) in the midst of moving to a new house, so here’s a quick update. (1) I recently replied to a critic of nullification on a major Iowa GOP website, who tried arguing that the federal government, after all, created 37 of the states. (2) I’ll be on Freedom Watch this weekend on the FOX Business Network, 10am and 8pm ET Saturday, 7pm and 11pm Sunday. (3) I made this neat promo video for the online course on the New Deal I’m teaching this fall, and which all the cool people are taking. The course will be very interactive, and after questions and answers we’ll open things up to whatever additional topic, unrelated to the course, anyone would like to discuss.
Posted by Tom Woods on July 31st, 2010 | 4 Comments »
I’ll be teaching an online course on the New Deal, called “The New Deal: History, Economics, and Law,” beginning September 6. I hope you’ll consider joining me.
Discussions of the economy, especially during times of crisis, are often framed in terms of lessons we supposedly learned during the Depression of the 1930s. If we are not to endure terrible times like those again, we are told, we must support whatever form of state intervention is currently being peddled. The Depression is supposed to be Exhibit A of the alleged instability of the free market left to its own devices, while the New Deal represents the indispensable corrective power of the state.
That’s why it’s so essential for those who believe in a free economy and a free society to know this history cold, and to know it better than anyone.
After we’re done with the course material for each class session I’ll stick around and discuss whatever other topics you’d like. Hope to see you on September 6!
Posted by Tom Woods on July 23rd, 2010 | 7 Comments »
I’m heading to Austin (where I’ll see you tomorrow, right?) tonight, but wanted to post this before leaving. The Seventeenth Amendment, which provided for the direct election of U.S. senators (who had previously been chosen by the state legislatures), is one of the many episodes in American history that your seventh-grade teacher portrayed to you as unambiguously wonderful and progressive, so much so that no opposing view need even be mentioned. Only a pigheaded idiot could oppose something as super as this, and you students aren’t pigheaded idiots, right?
Law professor Todd Zywicki has done some of the best work on this subject. This book review he wrote is from 1997, but it gives a good overview of the real intent and the actual consequences of the Seventeenth Amendment, as opposed to the comic-book version we all got in school.
Posted by Tom Woods on July 20th, 2010 | No Comments »
Here’s an interview I did with The American Spectator last week while in Las Vegas for FreedomFest. The focus, of course, is my new book, Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century. (The prose is a little awkward at times because it’s a transcription of a spoken conversation; it would be easier if you could hear my inflections.) It’s great to see nullification getting attention in outlets like this.
Thomas E. Woods, Jr., is the New York Times bestselling author of ten books. A senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Woods holds a bachelor's degree in history from Harvard and his master's, M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University.
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