CULTURE

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.