Economic history is often ignored by most economic departments in the United States. It’s seen as a boring topic, but it’s something that simply can’t be ignored.
If we’re serious about correcting the many errors of the past century, we must start by studying our country’s economic history. Since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the U.S. has embarked on a thoroughly interventionist path. From the creation of the income tax to the establishment of a permanent national security state bureaucracy, the U.S. went from a humble Republic to a bloated empire in a matter of decades.
What has largely enabled this unprecedented growth is the massive printing press that is the Fed. Politicians are generally averse to raising taxes on people. People can generally feel direct taxes instantly and will quickly get unruly. Inflation, a hidden tax at its core, is one way politicians try to circumvent this.
Through the debasement of the currency, politicians use central banking to fund their large projects. In the process, people’s savings gradually get wiped out. Then, they end up having to foot massive spending bills further down the line.
Easy money comes with other costs such as the boom-and-bust cycle, which is the product of the manipulation of interest rates that sends confusing signals to entrepreneurs during the boom phase. As a result, a misallocation of resources takes place and the economy enters an inevitable bust phase.
Most of this happens in a cyclical manner, which makes it easy to predict if one knows their history. However, history departments these days have been totally corrupted by leftism and other interventionist strains of thought.
It’s up to alternative media and other institutions to fill in the void and provide people with real history so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past, which will undoubtedly hurt our posterity.