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A Magazine of American Culture

The “United States of America” was never a consolidated unitary nation but was from the beginning, from colonial times, a disparate collection of ethnocultural and ethnoreligious peoples of different beliefs, backgrounds, and values. The Framers recognized this. The US Constitution created a decentralized federal republic of independent sovereign states who delegated explicit powers to the general government, reserving the bulk of their powers to the states and local governments. Their intention was never to create a ubiquitous European-style centralized nation-state, a leviathan with unre...

Cronyism: Liberty versus Power in Early America, 1607–1849 by Patrick Newman Mises Institute, 2021, 362 pp. Patrick Newman dedicates Cronyism to Murray Rothbard, and it is a fitting choice, as this outstanding book continues and extends Rothbard’s brilliant interpretation of American history. Newman is eminently qualified to do so, having edited both the fifth volume of Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty and his The Progressive Era. Like Rothbard also, he tells us exactly the principles he uses in setting forward his account of events. One of these is that “history is a clash between...

Cronyism: when the government passes policies to benefit special-interest politicians, bureaucrats, businesses, and other groups at the expense of the general public

Last month I reviewed Samuel Moyn’s Humane (New York, 2021) but discussed only a few topics in it. Owing to the book’s great importance, I’d like in what follows to address another issue as well, and this is something with which many readers will already be familiar. The principal theme of Moyn’s book, it will be recalled, is that efforts to make war humane can detract from, or even impede, the more important task of bringing war to an end, or at least drastically curtailing it. In arguing for this view, Moyn points out that it is only in recent times that regulations and treaties...