Quotes from Thomas E. Woods

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

The story of American history that most students have encountered for at least the past several decades amounts to a series of drearily predictable clichés: the Civil War was all about slavery, antitrust law saved us from wicked big business, Franklin Roosevelt got us out of the Depression, and so on. From the colonial settlements through the presidency of Bill Clinton, this book, in its brief compass, aims to set the record straight.

It is only with government help—in the form of subsidies, restrictions on potential rivals, and the like—that business can "exploit" the public in any meaningful sense.

As fine a document as the Constitution is, the Antifederalists, who were not frivolous men, raised some prescient criticisms. Patrick Henry was concerned that the "general welfare" clause would someday be interpreted to authorize practically any federal power that might be imagined.

The mid-1960s also saw a change in the way a good portion of the American intellectual class chose to view poverty and welfare. Contemptuously dismissed was any distinction between a "deserving" and a "non-deserving" poor; such thinking was said to be terribly judgmental.

It's a myth that "predatory pricing" exploited American consumers and created business monopolies. ? Thanks to government subsidies, many of America's railroads were often laid on inefficient, circuitous routes. ? Rockefeller, Carnegie, Dow, and other great American businessmen did more for America than all the big-government programs combined.

THE DECADE OF GREED? Ever since the New Deal, no successful American presidential candidate had run on an anti-government, pro-freedom platform; certainly none governed that way.

The main point that nullification addresses is that a government allowed to determine the scope of its own powers cannot remain limited for long.

The protective tariff was perhaps the most controversial economic issue of the antebellum period. High tariffs, intended to protect Northern industry from foreign competition, were a terrible burden to the agricultural South, which had little industry to protect. To Southerners, the tariffs meant higher prices for manufactured goods because they bought them abroad and paid the tariff or because they bought them from Northerners at the inflated prices that tariff protection made possible.

American presidents send a million Russians back to Stalin

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings. Ludwig von Mises

Worse still, throughout the program's first decade, two-thirds of participants never even finished. Let that sink in: two-thirds did not even bother to complete a free job-training program—financed by hard-working Americans.

No wonder historians loathe Harding and Coolidge; these presidents' success goes to show how much better off the country might be if ambitious politicians with their grandiose plans would just shut up and leave us alone.

In the late 1990s, when President Bill Clinton said he intended to "end welfare as we know it," he proposed an increase in the Job Corps budget. So a program that had been a total failure for three decades, with very little to show for the billions it had squandered, was to be rewarded with a bigger budget.