Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government

Politics and thieves, coercion and regulation, fascism and the Fed, centralization and liberty, workers and unions, trade and freedom, free-market achievements and government disasters in American history—this book covers it all!

Organized Crime collection of essays in the tradition of Austrian political economy—a combination of applied economics and the study of governmental reality. Unlike “mainstream” economists who are content to spin mathematical model after mathematical model which explain little or nothing about the real world, DiLorenzo’s focus has always been just the opposite—to use economic understanding to gain a better understanding of how the political-economic world works. Austrian economics is indispensable to succeed at this task.

The book is divided into six sections: “Coercion and Regulation” analyzes various aspects of government regulation of business; “Politics and Thieves” is of course about the inherent nature of government; “Centralization versus Liberty” discusses the never-ending quest by statists to monopolize and centralize political power so as to isolate themselves as much as possible from public influence; “Money and the State” describes the myriad evils of central banking, which was always thought of by its original proponents in America as an engine of corruption; “Workers and Unions” discusses various labor union myths and superstitions that too often cloud the public’s thinking about the reality of labor markets; and “Truth and Lies about Markets” is a taxonomy of some of the main market-failure myths that have long been used to illegitimately advance the cause of economic interventionism, as well as some newer ones.

In Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government, Thomas J. DiLorenzo strips away the vast apparatus of establishment propaganda and exposes the government smokescreen. No statist lies are safe from his scrutiny. In his straightforward and methodical approach to uncovering truths of freedom, liberty has a champion.

Introduction: Austrian Political Economy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Section One: Coercion and Regulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1. Four Thousand Years of Price Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2. The Other War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

3. Who Will Regulate the Regulators?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

4. Regulation and the Stock Market. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

5. Our Totalitarian Regulatory Bureaucracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

6. Antitrust, Anti-Truth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

7. Antitrust Luddites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

8. Socialized Healthcare vs. the Laws of Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Section Two: Politics and Thieves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

9. Pay to Play: Why the Fuss? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

10. Fed-ACORN Criminality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

11. Price Gouging: The Real Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

12. Farmed Robbery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

13. The Founding Father of Crony Capitalism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

14. The Curse of Instigationism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

15. The State’s Media Lapdogs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

Section Three: Centralization versus Liberty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

16. Freedom and Federalism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

17. The Origins of Nullification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

18. The Real Meaning of the Fourth of July . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

19. Electing U.S. Senators was a Bad Idea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

20. False Virtue: The Politics of Lying About History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

21. How (and Why) the Lincoln Myth was Invented . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

22. Centralization Lets the Worst Rise to the Top . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

23. Death by Government: The Missing Chapter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

24. The Birth of American Imperialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

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viii · Organized Crime

25. Paul Krugman’s Politically-Correct “Civil War” Delusions . . . . . . . . . . 86

26. Grand Old Tyrants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

27. Facialism: The New American System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

28. In Defense of Sedition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

29. Distorting History in the Service of the State. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

Section Four: Money and the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

30. Central Banking as an Engine of Corruption. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

31. States’ Rights vs. Monetary Monopoly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

32. How Central Banking Hides the Cost of War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

33. How the Fed Creates Unemployment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

34. The Myth of a “Libertarian” Fed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

35. The Myth of the “Independent” Fed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

36. Why the Government is Responsible for the Sub-Prime

Mortgage Meltdown. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136

Section Five: Workers and Unions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

37. The Political Economy of Government Employee Unions. . . . . . . . . . 143

38. The Inherent Violence of Unions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

39. The False Ideological Foundation of Unionism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

40. Markets, Not Unions, Give us Leisure and Safety on the Job . . . . . . . . 153

41. The Union Conspiracy Against Walmart Employees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156

42. How “Sweatshops” Help the Poor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

Section Six: Truth and Lies about Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

43. The Truth about the “Robber Barons”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

44. The Truth about the Sherman Antitrust Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168

45. The Myth of “Natural” Monopoly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172

46. The Virtues of Tax “Loopholes” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

47. Macroeconomists Discover Economics and Debunk

the New Deal (Again) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180

48. Will Socialism Make You Happier? The Trojan Horse of

“Happiness Research” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

49. The Canard of “Asymmetric Information” as a Source of

Market Failure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192

50. The Real Ethics Problem in America. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198

51. The Myth of Government Job Creation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

52. The Myth of the Male/Female Wage Gap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207