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Of course the Civil War was about slavery, and everyone knew it at the time. No, Nikki Haley, it wasn’t about states’ rights, except to the extent that Southern states were trying to force Northern states to help maintain slavery

it may be worth delving a bit deeper into the background here. Why did slavery exist in the first place? Why was it confined to only part of the United States? And why were slaveholders willing to start a war to defend the institution, even though abolitionism was still a fairly small movement and they faced no imminent risk of losing their chattels?

The American system of chattel slavery wasn’t motivated primarily by racism, but by greed. Slaveholders were racists, and they used racism both to justify their behavior and to make the enslavement of millions more sustainable, but it was the money and the inhumane greed that drove the racist system.

Maria Theresa died in 1780 and was followed by Joseph II. The problem of succession had caused Maria Theresa considerable grief in her early years, and she had vowed to create not only governmental institutions to protect her lands but familial ones as well, most notably by making certain that there would never again be a shortage of Habsburgs to rule the monarchy (after her marriage, the official name of the family changed from Habsburg to Habsburg-Lorraine

Maria Theresa kept most of the authority in her hands

frequent clashes between the strong-willed mother and the strong-willed son

Economists already knew about rising income inequality. What excited them was Piketty’s novel hypothesis about the growing importance of disparities in wealth, especially inherited wealth, as opposed to earnings. We are, Piketty suggested, returning to the kind of dynastic, “patrimonial” capitalism that prevailed in the late 19th century.

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century” seems to have been an “event” book that many buyers didn’t stick with; an analysis of Kindle highlights suggested that the typical reader got through only around 26 of its 700 pages. Still, Piketty was undaunted.

Piketty, however, sees inequality as a social phenomenon, driven by human institutions. Institutional change, in turn, reflects the ideology that dominates society: “Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological and political.”

In his landmark Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty and his grad students trace the world’s capital flow for 300 years, showing (among other things) that when the wealth of the richest 10 percent of us crosses a threshold, this capital class gains the ability to command political outcomes: they can turn their wealth into pro-wealth policies, which make them wealthier, and gives them more control over our policies.

Once that inequality tipping-point is reached, society grows inexorably more unequal and more unfair, as our rules change not merely to favor the rich, but to disfavor the poor

The thirty glorious years came to a halt at the end of the 1970s, when the wealth of the few had recovered to the point where the richest 10 percent could begin to nudge policy to their favor and everyone else’s detriment.

At roughly the same time, in the early 1860s, the U.S. liberated nearly four million enslaved black Americans, and Alexander II of Russia freed some 23 million serfs.

“In many ways, Russian serfdom was similar to American slavery,” writes Mr. Kolchin, a history professor emeritus at the University of Delaware. “They had similar lifespans, emerging in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, growing and solidifying over the course of the eighteenth century, reaching maturity in the early nineteenth century, and perishing in the 1860s.”

In both countries, emancipation initially seemed to herald a heyday of even greater reforms as stagnant, hierarchical societies based on compulsory labor appeared to be ready to reinvent themselves as vibrant ones celebrating free labor and free markets.

However, the critical difference between Eastern and Western Europe has to do with waterways.  Western Europe has an abundance of navigable rivers, coastlines, and harbors along the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean, North, and Baltic Seas.  In the High Middle Ages, these fostered the revival of trade and the rise of towns, a money economy, and a middle class opposed to the feudal structure dominated by the nobles and Church.

Kings also opposed the nobles and the Church, so the middle class townsmen provided them with valuable allies and money.  With this money, kings could buy two things.  First of all, they could raise mercenary armies armed with guns to limit the power of the nobles.  Secondly, they could form professional bureaucracies staffed largely by their middle class allies who were both more efficient since they were literate and more loyal since they were the king's natural allies and dependant on him for their positions.  As a result, kings in Western Europe were able to build strong centralized nation-states by the 1600's.

Eastern Europe, in stark contrast to Western Europe, provided practically a mirror image of its historical development before 1600. Being further inland compared to Western Europe hurt Eastern Europe's trade, since the sea and river waterways vital to trade did not exist there in such abundance as they did in Western Europe. Factors limiting trade also limited the growth of a strong middle class in Eastern Europe.  This meant that kings had little in the way of money or allies to help them against the nobles.  That in turn meant that peasants had few towns where they could escape the oppression of the nobles.  Therefore, strong nobilities plus weak, and oftentimes elective, monarchies were the rule in Eastern Europe before 1600.  At the same time, the nobles ruled over peasants whose status actually was sliding deeper into serfdom rather than emerging from it.

Michael Cembalest, the chief investment officer of JPMorgan Chase, wrote in July of this year (in a clients-only newsletter obtained by Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson) that “profit margins have reached levels not seen in decades,” and “reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement.” (Cembalest printed the latter quote in boldfaced lettering.) “US labor compensation,” he explained, “is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP.”

Citigroup analysts see the American postindustrial economy’s abandonment of fair play as an interesting fact to consider in formulating future investment strategies

“The upper classes of this country raped this country” is one of the more polite things that Morgan Stanley money manager Steve Eisman has to say on the eve of the 2008 sub-prime fiasco.

you can define what kind of conservative a person is by what year they want to go back to

Some conservatives, apparently including some in Senator Rand Paul’s office, want to go back to the 1850s. They believe that Abraham Lincoln helped put us on the path to the leviathan state. Many other conservatives want to go back to the 1890s. They think Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and the other Progressives set us on that course.

in the 1980s, when conservatism was at its most politically and intellectually vibrant, the dominant voices in the movement celebrated Lincoln, the Progressive Era and even the New Deal.

A truly free society is not simply one that limits the power of the central government; many times in history, central governments have defended the liberty of non-elites against the coercions of well-­organized local power brokers. In American history, freedom for African-Americans did not evolve spontaneously. It required first a bloody civil war to end slavery and then intervention by the federal government a century later to bring about the end of legal segregation.

He is necessarily a moral relativist, since he does not believe that there is a higher perspective from which one person can dictate another’s ends. Morality for him is more like a useful coordinating device than a categorical imperative. But surely the Western tradition that Hayek celebrates is as concerned with virtue as with freedom, whether from the standpoint of Christianity or that of classical republicanism. One searches in vain through this or any of his other books for a serious treatment of religion or the moral concerns that animate religious ­believers.

Hayek made the slipperiest of slippery slope arguments: the smallest move toward the expansion of government would lead to a cascade of bad consequences that would result in full-blown authoritarian socialism. If anything, however, the history of the past 50 years shows us that the slippery slope has all sorts of ledges and handholds by which we can brake our descent into serfdom and indeed climb back up.

For much of human history, what we now call “privacy” was better known as being rich

depended on another, even more impressive achievement: the creation of a middle class

The historical link between privacy and the forces of wealth creation helps explain why privacy is under siege today. It reminds us, first, that mass privacy is not a basic feature of human existence but a byproduct of a specific economic arrangemen

Nicholas’ power as an Autocrat was indeed so absolute that any command, even as extreme as the one to march on France, was fully within his power should he choose to exercise it

Throughout his reign, Nicholas jealously guarded the recognized prerogatives of the ruler in all aspects of government and he exercised a more personal control in state affairs than any other ruler since Peter the Great

Only a strong Emperor could bear the crushing burden of such a system of personal government and, as events after 1848 made clear, even Russia’s iron-willed Emperor himself could not bear such a burden in the face of serious crises.

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.

Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was one of the most explosive political events of the twentieth century. The violent revolution marked the end of the Romanov dynasty and centuries of Russian Imperial rule. During the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks, led by leftist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, seized power and destroyed the tradition of csarist rule. The Bolsheviks would later become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

In the early 1900s, Russia was one of the most impoverished countries in Europe with an enormous peasantry and a growing minority of poor industrial workers.

In 1861, the Russian Empire finally abolished serfdom. The emancipation of serfs would influence the events leading up to the Russian Revolution by giving peasants more freedom to organize.

You have no doubt heard it said by every sort of creeping thing within our rotted timber piles, by old romantic Oxford dons and Marble Statue freaks alike, that we must not be too harsh on them, who laid the groundwork of the West; that slavery in the ancient world was more moderate, more reasonable, more civilized, than that of the modern age. This is a lie. Both spill off any human scale, an oceanic suffering too large to apprehend. There is nothing decent, nothing civilized, nothing human about either; nothing to defend in the sentencing to social death, whatever might be said this time about why it’s not the same.

But it is the same. It always is. For every cultured Hellene made a household slave whose treatment might, in the right half-light, just barely seem humane, thousands lived and died in darkness to keep the master’s table laden high with silverware and salt. For every freedman’s son who might take their place upon the course of honors, countless more freeborn Romans were sent down to bondage in their youth

Thirty percent of the city of Rome lived in chains at the empire’s height; they lived, on average, to the age of seventeen. And these were the lucky ones: out of the fields, out of the mines, out of the pits and quarries. We have little detailed evidence of how victims of the latifundia would fare; the welfare of their farm equipment is not a historian’s concern.