Thomas DiLorenzo

An Open Letter To Treasury Secretary Bessent

Dear Secretary Bessent, I read with great interest your July 21 comment at the Federal Reserve Capital Conference that: “What we need to do is examine the entire Federal Reserve institution and whether they have been successful. .…

America’s Forgotten Independence Movement

There were three independence movements in America prior to the War to Prevent Southern Independence (1861-1865).  The American Revolution was a war of secession to gain independence from the British empire.  The New England Federalists plotted to secede…

To Make America Free Again

Everyone likes to be flattered by being called “great,” especially Donald Trump. Equally as flattering is to have one’s entire country called “great” if not “the greatest,” “exceptional,” or “indispensable.” Or perhaps even “a shining city on a…

The American-Israeli Nineteenth-Century Ways of War

In his book Nation, State and Economy, published in 1919, Ludwig von Mises wrote of how nineteenth-century imperialist powers often preceded their wars of “conquest, subjugation, and extermination” with the dehumanization of their victims through massive propaganda campaigns which…

The American Pravda Sues The Trump Administration

In a recent executive order, President Trump called for an end to taxpayer funding of NPR and “public” television (PBS), created by Congress in 1967 to laughingly create an “independent” news source.  Yes, they have always been independent…

The Tariff Tax Statistic the Trump Fanboys Don’t Want You to Know About

FOX commentator Charles Payne recently repeated Pat Buchanan’s old post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy (After this, therefore because of this) about tariffs in a Breitbart column. The fallacy goes like this: 1). Economic growth occurred during the post-Civil War period up to…

The Federal Reserve Protection Racket

The banking elites who had long wanted to control money and credit succeeded when they created the Fed in 1913. They claimed it would benefit the little guy — but it was a scam. … Most Americans have…

Judicial Tyranny: Tip of the Deep State Sword

Hundreds of Democrat party political hacks who happen to have attended law school for a couple of years have been rewarded for their hackism with appointments as federal district court judges. Armed with lifetime tenure and dressed in spooky looking…

Gangsters, Terrorists, & Deep State Judicial Tyranny

The primary purpose of the federal judiciary is to make sure that anything the federal government does is almost never, ever, ruled to be unconstitutional. This is Hamilton’s constitutional regime. A believer in unlimited government, Alexander Hamilton’s constitutional…

Trump’s False Tariff “Fairness” Argument

President Trump’s argument for starting an international trade war is based on a socialistic-sounding plea for “fairness” and equality. Some foreign governments plunder their citizens with high tariff taxes on American imports, thereby forcing them to pay higher…

Universities: Dysfunctional Incubators of Socialism

Ludwig von Mises called the universities of his day “nurseries of socialism” because of the inevitable socialist bias of all government-funded universities. He also said that there is always a remnant of students, however, that does not buy into the…

How FDR’s Attack on the Gold Standard Spawned an Age of Inflation

In his great classic, Crisis and Leviathan, Robert Higgs explained how Franklin Roosevelt’s attacks on the gold standard ushered in “the age of inflation” that has now robbed generations of Americans through the inflation tax. The explanation begins with…

Constitutional Dictatorship?

When President Trump recently began calling the Ukrainian dictator a dictator elements of both Left and Right in the Washington establishment became quite indignant over it. After all, he is their poster boy for their beloved “foreign aid.”…

Trump’s Revival of Lincoln’s “Colonization” Plan

Now that the US and Israeli military have bombed almost all of Gaza into a smoldering ruin and killed tens or hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, President Trump has proposed getting Jordan and Egypt to house the remaining…

“Foreign Aid” Enriches the Rich While Impoverishing the Impoverished

If there is anything we have learned from the American welfare state it is that from the very beginning it created a moral hazard problem whereby paying people for not working incentivizes them to drop out of the…

How the McKinley Tariff Almost Destroyed the Republican Party

President Trump’s first major speech on economic policy in 2017 was delivered in Lexington, Kentucky near the home of Henry Clay, the early nineteenth century leader of the Whig party and the epitome of a political tool of…

Stakeholder Capitalism & The Corporate KPI Cult

In private business “[t]here is no need to limit the discretion of subordinates by any rules or regulations other than that underlying all business activities, namely, to render their operations profitable.”—Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy, p. 46 In this quote from his…