Review of "33 Questions about American History You're Not Supposed to Ask" by Tom Woods
Tom Woods has undoubtedly written one of the better books of the “US history questions you’re not supposed to ask” genre (particularly due to his rather rare among the profession libertarian instincts). The book covers Black history, Native American history, a smattering of Great Depression and WWII era history, and, of course, a substantial amount of revolutionary war history (immigration, jury nullification, Whiskey Rebellion, states’ rights) and general Constitutional law (war powers, “imperial presidency”, commerce clause, “elastic clause”).
Probably one of the weakest chapters is Chapter 10, on the Civil War’s relation to slavery. The original texts from the Southern states stating their reasons for independence are very clear the Southern states seceded due to the Northern states’ refusal to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and because the Republican Party “seeks to extinguish [slavery] by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.”
The chapter refuting the idea that discrimination is to blame for racial differences in income and job placement is, while not explicitly hereditarian, clear that institutional change cannot lead to greater Black-White equality without lowering White outcomes. The fact that most Black doctorates are in education and that “in 1988 that of the 608 Ph.D. degrees awarded that year in mathematics and computer sciences, 2 were earned by black students” is made clear, making it impossible for universities to meet even relatively small targets for hiring Black faculty. The Chinese in Malaysia being successful despite state-sanctioned discrimination and the decline of the Black-White earnings gap prior to affirmative action is also pointed out, as well as that Black youth from high-income households underperform Asian youth from low income households on standardized tests.
The gradual decline in the Black-White test score gap between the 1960s and early 1990s is explained as not being due to desegregation as thus:
“Between 1975 and 1988, the years of the greatest black improvement, black thirteen-year-olds in predominantly minority schools achieved essentially the same gains in reading scores as their counterparts in majority-white schools.”
The book is very good on American revolutionary era history as well as Black American history. However, it is, for a person with a background in Austrian economics (who are supposed to be more savvy than Keynesians), surprisingly weak on economics:
“Sending free goods to these countries has devastated local producers, who cannot compete against a price of zero, and has therefore all but destroyed local incentives to produce.” (Chapter 29)
Any person with even the mildest economics training would understand this to be a classic example of Hazlitt’s broken window fallacy. Foreign aid, on paper, is bad for the first world taxpayer and good for the third world recipient (though the weight of the literature has found that aid, as a rule, does not result in economic growth, mostly because it’s used directly for consumption).
The myth Native Americans used fish as fertilizer is shown to be impossible, as Native Americans did not use any kind of fertilizer (Chapter 16), being mobile enough to simply let land lie fallow after its soil was exhausted. The idea Native Americans lived in harmony with nature is also thoroughly refuted (Chapter 3), the Natives having a habit of setting massive fires to clear new land for agriculture and developing a system of property rights for fishing.
Bill Clinton’s assistance in relocating jihadists to Bosnia and support for the Bosnian Muslims (who then supported the Islamists in the Algerian civil war) above any other goal in the Yugoslav wars (Chapter 5) is forthrightly condemned. The last chapter exposes Anglo-American media coverage of war deaths in late 1990s Kosovo as a massive fraud, turning less than seven thousand killed and missing into hundreds of thousands, with numerous alleged mass grave sites revealing hardly any bodies. Mass Serb expulsion of Albanians, Woods points out, only began after the start of the U.S. bombing of Serbia, which, of course, also resulted in mass Albanian expulsion of Serbs and Gypsies.
Rating: four out of five stars