History

A few historical and inconvenient notes left on the cutting room floor during Black History Month.

Yes, we’ve got the pandemic, lockdowns, a worsening deficit, etc. But we still live in a relatively free country at the most prosperous time in human history.

Life in the socialist utopia of East Germany was a waking nightmare.

November 7th marks the 103rd anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, where Communist revolutionaries overthrew the czarist government of Russia, eventually leading to the establishment of the Soviet Union.

People who believe that slavery is an efficient system of production are people who are ready to impose 100% marginal rates of taxation in the belief that doing so is economically harmless.

Chief among the policies that reward inferiority and irresponsibility is the welfare state.

While slavery enriched slave owners, it impoverished not only the slaves but also the United States as a whole.

Similarities between slavery and socialism, and indeed the aggressive anti-capitalist rhetoric of proslavery ideology, are seldom examined in the “New History of Capitalism” literature.

Most of the effort to rewrite American history has its roots among the intellectual elite on our college campuses whose message has been sold to predominantly white college students who have little understanding of how they are being used.

Contrary to, the ideological propaganda and rhetoric of the Race Marxists and Identity Politics Warriors, America is not and has not been an irredeemable captive of racism as asserted to have begun with the country’s first arrival of slaves in 1619.

Where does this viewing of history through the prism of modern-day feelings end?

Patriotism is more than a sentiment. It is a necessity. To keep what history has presented to us, Americans must either love it or lose it. Balkanize America and you risk becoming the Balkans.

Slavery was not necessary for cotton, and cotton was not necessary for industrialization. Had chattel slavery never taken hold in the United States, we would very likely be richer than we are today.

Government should do its job of protecting constitutional rights. After that, black people should be simply left alone as opposed to being smothered by the paternalism inspired by white guilt.

There is a tendency to exaggerate the “evils” which of the factory system and factory legislation was not essential to the ultimate disappearance of those “evils.” Conditions which modern standards would condemn were then common to the community as a whole.

The crisis of 2020 has invited a lot of comparisons to the past, particularly the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 and to various war efforts. For those concerned with banking, public finance and monetary policy, the summer of 1914 might be a more appropriate candidate.

Marx’s critique of capitalism and capitalist society has shaped much of the social thinking in Western countries that led to the welfare state and extensive government intervention into economic affairs.

The 1619 Project sacrifices scholarly standards in the service of the ideological agenda.

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation (modeled after the earlier War Finance Corporation) was created in early 1932 under the Hoover Administration as what amounted to the “discount lending” facility of the Federal Reserve System: it would lend to financial institutions chartered by states and in rural areas.

The reputation of the 1619 project’s other essays, many of them entirely unobjectionable adaptations of scholarly insights for a popular audience, has suffered because of the NY Times’ inflexible refusal to address erroneous historical claims in the essays by Hannah-Jones and Desmond.

While Lincoln’s colonization remarks grate the modern ear, and evince a patronizing paternalism toward the program’s intended participants, they also reflect the sincerity of his anti-slavery beliefs and an accompanying recognition that white-supremacist violence would not end with the formal abolition of the institution.

Ginsburg explores the U.S. Constitution and features interviews with and gains the perspectives from constitutional experts of all political views — liberal, conservative and libertarian.

Seventy-five years have now passed since that fateful meeting at Yalta. Stalin, who helped Hitler start the Second World War, reaped his reward at the end of it: Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, at the cost of terror and tyranny for all the people who were forced to live in the “socialist paradise” for almost half a century following the end of the war in 1945.

One of the most heated and controversial issues today concerns the place of slavery in the history of the United States, and attitudes toward the institution of human bondage in the Western world in general.