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More on Piketty

Following this afternoon’s post, I decided to dig a little further into Thomas Piketty’s data spreadsheets. I’ll start with two general observations: I. Decennial Averaging Piketty seems to have an inordinate fondness for converting his data  into decennial averages. Usually this is done by the not-terribly-sophisticated technique of simply adding up annual stats (or in many cases percentage […]

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The 16th Amendment: It actually wasn’t about wealth redistribution

In commiseration of tax day, it’s worth remembering that the 16th Amendment wrought unparalleled constitutional havoc by unchaining the taxing mechanisms of the federal government from the unwittingly adopted but more or less effective “capitations clause” of Article I, Section 9. While a tendency exists to think of this action as a hallmark of the

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Lincoln and the Wadsworth Letter: a Reconstruction Forgery?

One of the most unusual documents in the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (Roy Basler, ed) is an excerpt of a letter allegedly written in 1864 by Lincoln to Gen. James S. Wadsworth. The document seems to reveal Lincoln’s support for universal black suffrage while also hinting at elements of an egalitarian turn in his racial views.

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Oakes, Napolitano, and Lincoln’s enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act

A little over a week ago I strongly criticized Judge Andrew Napolitano’s recent appearance on the Daily Show for his slipshod handling of Civil War history and for a couple of factual errors in his presentation about the Morrill Tariff. I was not the only critic, and others also seized upon Napolitano’s claim that Lincoln

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Before you start claiming that tariffs caused the Civil War…

It’s an argument we’ve all heard before: tariffs really “caused” the Civil War. The claim is unequivocally in error and was the historical biproduct of a conscious Confederate diplomatic strategy to draw the free trade-oriented Great Britain to its side in the war despite the latter’s antislavery disposition. There is a subtler truth though that

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