PrairiePundit

 Monica Showalter: In the year of Joe Biden, set to steal a fraudulently won presidency, the mainstream media are pushing another fraudulent "narrative," this one of America rejecting capitalism. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post opened the new year with an appalling attack on free markets. The page one headline from the Washington Post was this: The stock market is ending 2020 at record highs, even as the virus surges and millions go hungry Not to be outdone, the New York Times ran a front page explainer headlined with this: Why Markets Boomed in a Year of Human Misery The logic here is atrocious. Stocks rose because companies were developing new products and new services that people want to buy, and often showing months of double-digit profits. Vaccine, anyone? Why the hell shouldn't the companies that develop COVID vaccines in record time see some kind of stock market rise? Do we like and want vaccines? Or do vaccin...

Karl W. Smith: ... One school of thought argues that slavery in general, and cotton in particular, was the driving force behind the development of America’s distinctive brand of capitalism. (The New York Times’s ambitious 1619 Project contains a good encapsulation of this argument.) But not only has this theory come under fire for inaccuracies, its central narrative is incorrect. The reality is that cotton played a relatively small role in the long-term growth of the U.S. economy. The economics of slavery were probably detrimental to the rise of U.S. manufacturing and almost certainly toxic to the economy of the South. In short: The U.S. succeeded in spite of slavery, not because of it. ... Still, it might be argued that the growth of a textile industry — in either the U.S. or Great Britain — would not have been possible without mass quantities of U.S. cotton. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be true. Following the Civil War, the production of cotton in the U.S. continue...