U.S. History

Public works as a cure for unemployment: proposed, debated, and defended with arguments that would sound familiar a century later.

The familiar story pits western farmer-debtors against eastern merchant-creditors. Rothbard's evidence says the story is wrong.

Mass unemployment gave the protectionists their best argument in a generation, and they nearly won.

Before the Federal Reserve, before the greenback, American writers were already designing a managed national paper currency, and arguing it could be more stable than gold.

Four western states answered the shortage of money by printing their own, and watched it depreciate in their hands.

They borrowed when prices were high and had to repay when prices were low. Should the legislature rescue them, or would rescue only deepen the ruin?

A wartime boom, a flood of bank paper, a speculative rush for western land, and then the reckoning.

America's first great depression arrived without a villain: no embargo, no war, no single blundering minister to blame. It seemed to rise out of the economy itself.

Vail recognized that market competition and “regulation and control are inconsistent with each other, and cannot be had at the same time.” Obviously, Vail favored the latter.

The modern way of dealing with criminal behavior has been mass incarceration, yet crime abounds. Murray Rothbard believed that restitution and other methods were superior to the present state-run system.