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Burton W. Folsom Jr. (born 1947, in Nebraska) is an American historian and author who held the Charles F. Kline chair in history and management at Hillsdale College from 2003 until his retirement in December 2016. [1]
Folsom received his B.A. from Indiana University in 1970, his M.A. from the University of Nebraska in 1973, and his doctorate in history from the University of Pittsburgh in 1976. Since 1988 he has edited Continuity: A Journal of History. He is a frequent columnist in the libertarian Freeman magazine and also contributes to other publications, writing in favor of free market economics and limited government. He taught American history at Murray State University in Kentucky from 1976 to 1994.
Folsom is a former associate of the Free Enterprise Institute and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, both free market think tanks, and a frequent guest of the libertarian organization Foundation for Economic Education.
Folsom has written several books that argue against commonly held views about the role of capitalism in the social developments of the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age. He believes the term robber barons is a misnomer, and that many leaders in big business were constructive visionaries who benefited consumers and were integral to the development of industry. [2]
In his book The Myth of the Robber Barons, Folsom distinguishes between political entrepreneurs, who ran inefficient businesses supported by government favors, and market entrepreneurs, who succeeded by providing better and lower-cost products or services, usually while facing vigorous competition.
Folsom identifies the following people as market entrepreneurs:
He regards these people as political entrepreneurs:
Folsom writes about economics and US history for several large publications, including The Wall Street Journal and the National Review . [4] [5] In a 2010 Wall Street Journal editorial, Folsom argues that the New Deal did not contribute to economic recovery and may have actually exacerbated the Great Depression. Folsom argues that the New Deal did little more than trade temporary poverty relief for crippling tax rates and mountains of debt, and that the post-war recovery is best attributed to the rollback of taxes and regulations imposed under the New Deal. [4]
Folsom has created several short videos for the conservative educational website Prager University. His lessons focus on the history of American economic development and entrepreneurs such as John D. Rockefeller:
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Anarcho-capitalism is a political philosophy and economic theory according to which all government institutions are unnecessary and can be replaced by private ones. Anarcho-capitalists hold that society tends to contractually self-regulate and civilize through the voluntary exchange of goods and services. This would ideally result in a voluntary society based on concepts such as the non-aggression principle, free markets and self-ownership. In such a society, private property rights would be enforced by private agencies. In the absence of statute private defence agencies and/or insurance companies would operate competitively in a market and fulfill the roles of courts and the police.
Crony capitalism, sometimes also called simply cronyism, is a pejorative term used in political discourse to describe a situation in which businesses profit from a close relationship with state power, either through an anti-competitive regulatory environment, direct government largesse, and/or corruption. Examples given for crony capitalism include obtainment of permits, government grants, tax breaks, or other undue influence from businesses over the state's deployment of public goods, for example, mining concessions for primary commodities or contracts for public works. In other words, it is used to describe a situation where businesses thrive not as a result of free enterprise, but rather collusion between a business class and the political class.
Standard Oil is the common name for a corporate trust in the petroleum industry that existed from 1882 to 1911. The origins of the trust lay in the operations of the Standard Oil Company (Ohio), which had been founded in 1870 by John D. Rockefeller. The trust was born on January 2, 1882, when a group of 41 investors signed the Standard Oil Trust Agreement, which pooled their securities of 40 companies into a single holding agency managed by nine trustees. The original trust was valued at $70 million. On March 21, 1892, the Standard Oil Trust was dissolved and its holdings were reorganized into 20 independent companies that formed an unofficial union referred to as "Standard Oil Interests." In 1899, the Standard Oil Company acquired the shares of the other 19 companies and became the holding company for the trust.
John Davison Rockefeller Sr. was an American businessman and philanthropist. He was one of the wealthiest Americans of all time and one of the richest people in modern history. Rockefeller was born into a large family in Upstate New York who moved several times before eventually settling in Cleveland, Ohio. He became an assistant bookkeeper at age 16 and went into several business partnerships beginning at age 20, concentrating his business on oil refining. Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company in 1870. He ran it until 1897 and remained its largest shareholder. In his retirement, he focused his energy and wealth on philanthropy, especially regarding education, medicine, higher education, and modernizing the Southern United States.
In economics and business ethics, a coercive monopoly is a firm that is able to raise prices and make production decisions without the risk that competition will arise to draw away their customers. A coercive monopoly is not merely a sole supplier of a particular kind of good or service, but it is a monopoly where there is no opportunity to compete with it through means such as price competition, technological or product innovation, or marketing; entry into the field is closed. As a coercive monopoly is securely shielded from the possibility of competition, it is able to make pricing and production decisions with the assurance that no competition will arise. It is a case of a non-contestable market. A coercive monopoly has very few incentives to keep prices low and may deliberately price gouge consumers by curtailing production.
In the 19th century, a captain of industry was a business leader whose means of amassing a personal fortune contributed positively to the country in some way. This may have been through increased productivity, expansion of markets, providing more jobs, or acts of philanthropy. This characterization contrasts with that of the robber baron, a business leader using political means to achieve personal ends.
Lawrence "Larry" W. Reed, also known as Larry Reed, is president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), where he has served as the Humphreys Family Senior Fellow since May 2019. Before joining FEE, Reed served as president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Midland, Michigan-based free-market think tank. To date, he remains Mackinac's president emeritus.
Antony Cyril Sutton was a British-American writer, researcher, economist, and professor.
Donald Joseph Boudreaux is a libertarian American economist, author, professor, and co-director of the Program on the American Economy and Globalization at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
Tyler Cowen is an American economist, columnist, and blogger. He is a professor at George Mason University, where he holds the Holbert L. Harris chair in the economics department.
Robber baron is a term first applied as social criticism by 19th century muckrakers and others to certain wealthy, powerful, and unethical 19th-century American businessmen. The term appeared in that use as early as the August 1870 issue of The Atlantic Monthly magazine. By the late 19th century, the term was typically applied to businessmen who used exploitative practices to amass their wealth. Those practices included unfettered consumption and destruction of natural resources, influencing high levels of government, wage slavery, squashing competition by acquiring their competitors to create monopolies and/or trusts that control the market, and schemes to sell stock at inflated prices to unsuspecting investors. The term combines the sense of criminal ("robber") and illegitimate aristocracy (“baron”) in a republic.
The term political entrepreneur may refer to any of the following:
The Old Right is an informal designation used for a branch of American conservatism that was most prominent from 1910 to the mid-1950s, but never became an organized movement. Most members were Republicans, although there was a conservative Democratic element based largely in the Southern United States. They are termed the "Old Right" to distinguish them from their New Right successors who came to prominence in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
The Second New Deal is a term used by historians to characterize the second stage, 1935–36, of the New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The most famous laws included the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, the Banking Act, the Wagner National Labor Relations Act, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, the Social Security Act, and the Wealth Tax Act.
Before, during and after his presidential terms and continuing today, there has been criticism of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945). His critics have questioned not only his policies and positions, but also accused him of trying to centralize power in his own hands by controlling both the government and the Democratic Party. Many denounced his breaking of a long-standing tradition by running for a third term in 1940.
David T. Beito is an American historian and professor emeritus of history at the University of Alabama.
Business history is a historiographical field which examines the history of firms, business methods, government regulation and the effects of business on society. It also includes biographies of individual firms, executives, and entrepreneurs. It is related to economic history. It is distinct from "company history" which refers to official histories, usually funded by the company itself.
Liberalism in the United States is based on concepts of unalienable rights of the individual. The fundamental liberal ideals of consent of the governed, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the separation of church and state, the right to bear arms, the right to due process, and equality before the law are widely accepted as a common foundation of liberalism. It differs from liberalism worldwide because the United States has never had a resident hereditary aristocracy, and avoided much of the class warfare that characterized Europe. According to American philosopher Ian Adams, "all US parties are liberal and always have been", they generally promote classical liberalism, which is "a form of democratized Whig constitutionalism plus the free market", and the "point of difference comes with the influence of social liberalism" and principled disagreements about the proper role of government.
The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths is a 2013 book written by Mariana Mazzucato which argues that the United States' economic success is a result of public and state-funded investments in innovation and technology, rather than a result of the small state, free market doctrine that often receives credit for the country's strong economy. Mazzucato argues that understanding the difference between the "myth" and the reality of this success is particularly important saying: "If the rest of the world wants to emulate the US model, they should do as the United States actually did, not as they say they did". The book was listed among the Financial Times best books of the year, and was reviewed in several publications including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. It is both praised and criticized by several social science journals and has started numerous discussions among economists and social scientists around the world about the role of the state in the world of technological innovations.
