Another book I'd say people should read, and one that's rather short is "The Myth of Robber Barons"
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It's a book that was published in the very early 90's and takes a contrarian look at some American monopolists in that they often times fought the government in the same industry in which they were in and won, despite being faced with infinite money printing in a sense. One thing that I think is very interesting, is that the book doesn't just take the counter point, but actually in the later chapters challenges the education system by pointing out what things school text books cover and what they omit in favor of a narrative. It's very interesting to see how even a hundred years ago the narrative was being pushed in academia.
Just finished Burton W. Folsom, Jr.'s
The Myth of the Robber Barons and I was pretty disappointed in the book until I was reading the final chapter. Even still, I find it was less than I was hoping for, as I was expecting more detail than it provided.
The book mainly comes off as a love letter to various entrepreneurs of the 1800s, instead of being an in-depth analysis of the misconceptions of these people and how they operated. I was hoping for a more analytical approach, with details regarding things like the working conditions and how they compared to other businesses (private
and public) at the time. Instead, it gave mini-biographies of various people and their notable business ventures.
It wasn't until the second to last chapter on Andrew Mellon that the author started dealing with direct counter-points to the prevailing narrative. I wanted more stuff like that throughout the book. The last chapter intensifies on that and really goes hard on giving examples of misconceptions and incorrect information (and outright lies) and counters them with sourced information that he also established in the earlier chapters.
Perhaps what I wanted was beyond the scope of this book, and he was just trying to counter one aspect, that of free enterprise vs government intervention. Additionally, the book was seemingly written for a more casual reader, like Henry Hazlitt's
Economics in One Lesson, which I also just recently finished and was also underwhelmed by, as it felt more like a conversation than a lesson. This is likely just my personal preference as I prefer books that are more analytical, near textbook-like. Both these books weren't bad, just not what I was exactly looking for.
Speaking of which, my next book is Sowell's latest. His writing style resonates much more with me, and follows the more analytical approach that I seek.
Sidenote: the most terrifying thing in the last chapter is Folsom showing just how much of our school's textbooks, even K-12, are written by literal communists. Good lord.
