[This article by Murray N. Rothbard is excerpted from a 30,000-word report to the Volker Fund, written in September 1961, giving a very detailed description of everything wrong with A History of the American Republic by George B. DeHuszar. The full memo will be included in the forthcoming collection Renaissance Man, edited by David Gordon.]

The road to Civil War must be divided into two parts:

1. the causes of the controversy over slavery leading to secession, and
2. the immediate causes of the war itself.

The reason for such split is that secession need not have led to Civil War, despite the assumption to the contrary by most historians.

The basic root of the controversy over slavery to secession, in my opinion, was the aggressive, expansionist aims of the Southern "slavocracy." Very few Northerners proposed to abolish slavery in the Southern states by aggressive war; the objection — and certainly a proper one — was to the attempt of the Southern slavocracy to extend the slave system to the Western territories. The apologia that the Southerners feared that eventually they might be outnumbered and that federal abolition might ensue is no excuse; it is the age-old alibi for "preventive war." Not only did the expansionist aim of the slavocracy to protect slavery by federal fiat in the territories as "property" aim to foist the immoral system of slavery on Western territories; it even violated the principles of states’ rights to which the South was supposedly devoted — and which would logically have led to a "popular sovereignty" doctrine.

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Bob Murphy, adjunct scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, discusses the Fed-created housing bubble, the bailout of Bear Sterns and JP Morgan, and the fallacies used to attempt to justify government intervention in the economy.

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or download MP3 here.