Uncategorized

The History of Slavery You Probably Weren’t Taught in School

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Fee Stories

Lawrence W. Reed

In “Recognizing Hard Truths About America’s History With Slavery,” published by FEE on February 11, 2023, I urged an assessment of slavery that includes its full “historical and cultural contexts” and that does not neglect “uncomfortable facts that too often are swept under the rug.”

The central notion of both that previous essay and this follow-up is that slavery was a global norm for centuries, not a peculiar American institution. America is not exceptional because of slavery in our past; we may, however, be exceptional because of the lengths to which we went to get rid of it. In any event, it is an age-old tragedy abolished in most places only recently (in the past two centuries or so). As British historian Dan Jones notes in Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages, …

Education

What Mises Understood about Prices and Trade That Socialist Economists Did Not

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Fee Stories

Walter Block and Robert Batemarco

Socialism is a very popular system. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders attracts thousands of fellow economic innocents on college campuses, and even professional economists of the ilk of Paul Samuelson were taken in by the siren song of this ineffective and evil system. (He predicted in his economics textbook that the USSR would overtake the American economy).

There stood Ludwig von Mises, like the Rock of Gibraltar, standing in the path of socialists of all types and varieties. He laid down the line: under socialism without free market prices, planning would necessarily be irrational. How and why, then, the existence of this pernicious system in Russia from 1917 to 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. How is it that socialism still exists in places like Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela? That is because market prices, generated elsewhere, were available to the economic dictators. During the period of USSR socialism, there was the Chicago board of trade and Consumers’ Reports. They made market prices available to the Soviet planners; they were a not-totally-unreasonable approximation to Russian realities. Nowadays, at least …