View source for Not content with failing at economics, the Mises Institute decides to fail at history too. Hint: They side with the Confederacy and the Axis Powers.

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[[Category:Reassessing the Presidency : The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom]]
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{{DES | des = A review of ''[[Reassessing the Presidency : The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom]]''.  "The book has conspiracy theories, bad history, bad economics, a strong libertarian bias, etc." | show=}}
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{{List|title=Not content with failing at economics, the Mises Institute decides to fail at history too. Hint: They side with the Confederacy and the Axis Powers.|links=true}}
{{Quotations|title=Not content with failing at economics, the Mises Institute decides to fail at history too. Hint: They side with the Confederacy and the Axis Powers.|quotes=true}}

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Libertarians and ancaps love liberty, right? Well, what if I told you that there was an 830 page PDF book by the Internet's favorite libertarian institute that takes neo-Confederate and pro-Axis stances?
The US Civil War War of Northern Aggression was just a scheme by Lincoln to raise tariffs on the South and had nothing at all to do with slavery... at least according to the "historians" and "economists" at the Mises Institute in Reassessing the Presidency.
In that book, the Mises Institute tries to argue that the North were the aggressors just like they try to argue that FDR was the aggressor in WW2. Reassessing the Presidency has a chapter called "Lincoln and the First Shot: A Study of Deceit and Deception" (p. 231) and a chapter called "Roosevelt and the First Shot: A Study of Deceit and Deception" (p. 453). Both of these articles are written by someone called John V. Denson, who also is the editor of the volume. These both are basically conspiracy theories about secret scheming to look like the wars that the US government entered were defensive wars.
Thomas DiLorenzo also wrote articles on Lincoln and FDR in that book. The articles are "Abraham Lincoln and the Triumph of Mercantalism" (p. 203) and "Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal: From Economic Fascism to Pork-Barrel Politics". Various parts of the Internet criticize him for neo-Confederate ties (Wikipedia, SPLC, RationalWiki). Unfortunately, John Denson seems to have avoided the same kind of negative attention that DiLorenzo has received so it's harder to just link to existing criticism on the Internet.
As an added bonus, there are 19 other articles of historical revisionism in Reassessing the Presidency, probably of equal quality (or lack thereof). Of course, one of those is another article about FDR. The Mises Institute really hates FDR and Lincoln.
I'll very briefly explain why this is bad history in case you want to cross-post this. The book has conspiracy theories, bad history, bad economics, a strong libertarian bias, etc., and it's all from reddit ancaps' favorite Internet source, mises.org. There's also implicit racism in "coincidentally" writing defenses of the explicitly racist sides in major wars.
The Mises Institute believes in praxeology, an anti-empirical way of reasoning about economics. So, naturally, any time they do economic analysis on their history, it's going to be based on something accepted by almost no legitimate scholarship.
Most of these authors are "economists" (see point #1), who do not have formal training in history. This doesn't automatically invalidate their points, but you should be aware that most of them are writing far outside of their alleged areas of expertise. They're also explicitly writing from a very partisan point of view (p. ix), based on very faulty premises (see point #1). The end result is a lot of quote-mining and the reliance on bad sources that reaffirm their preconceived biases.
The Civil War definitely was about slavery. Just read the primary sources directly if you don't believe this. There are plenty of contemporary references to the debate over slavery and the Confederate constitution references slavery a lot, too. Section 9.4 of their constitution prohibits making slavery illegal. Georgia's secession document is full of references to slavery. Someone really should have told the government of Georgia that the official reason for the Civil War was going to be about tariffs.
And since most of this has focused so far on the apologia of the Confederacy (and there are plenty of links above if you want more debunking), I will also provide a brief overview of the apologia of the Axis Powers. On page 454, we see the thesis of "Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the First Shot".
The author will argue, however, that President Roosevelt desperately wanted and sought a war. He not only provoked the Japanese into firing the first shot at Pearl Harbor, but he was ultimately responsible for withholding vital information from the Pearl Harbor military commanders which, if conveyed to them, probably would have prevented the surprise attack altogether.
This makes it quite clear that the author is promoting the Pearl Harbor advance-knowledge conspiracy theory.
We also see quite clear bias on page 460:
Neither World War I nor World War II was inevitable or necessary, especially from an American perspective; they were caused primarily by bad political choices that were greatly influenced by very large economic interests of a small number of politically powerful people.
Notice how the author groups World War I in with World War II because people are more likely to see World War I as a pointless, unnecessary war. He has to take this stance because World War II presents a clear counter-example to the isolationism of modern libertarians like Ron Paul, the Mises Institute, and most ancaps. Fighting fascist aggression seems to most reasonable people like a pretty clear example of a just war, so it definitely makes sense for him to try to group both World Wars together. Remember, though, that the point of this compilation is to talk about various presidents and this article is about FDR.
Denson goes on at length in his article about Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor to blame World War II on the Treaty of Versailles, completely sidestepping the issue that the treaty happened before FDR was president and thus the situation facing FDR's presidency couldn't have been avoided merely by creating a time machine and reverting something done years before he was president. Bonus apologia, this time for the Central Powers:
[Niall Ferguson] further argues that, "[I]f a war had been fought, but without Britain and America, the victorious Germans might have created a version of the European Union, eight decades ahead of schedule," and the British would have remained strong, especially financially.
Yeah. Europe would be living in a totalitarian version of the European Union where everyone would speak German and live under an absolutist emperor! That's definitely "liberty", by some definition of "liberty".
Throughout this essay, the author continually uses scare quotes, calling Pearl harbor a '"surprise" attack'. Denson attempts to blame the whole war on FDR's provocations, which ignores the fact that the Japanese were trying to take over eastern Asia. The Americans at the time had the Philippines as a colony, conquered during the Spanish-American War. In other words, the Americans were already in the way of the Japanese imperial ambitions. In fact, the attack on the Philippines was hours apart from the attack on Pearl Harbor.
By the way, it's pretty impressive how that Treaty of Versailles has anything to do with the Japanese Empire and their motivations in the Pacific Theater of World War II! By the way, the Japanese actually fought against the Germans in World War I.
Of course, the author relies on unreliable sources like Robert Stinett's Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, ignoring the fact that very few people take those sources seriously. If you want to debunk this article, the key is to find things other people wrote to debunk the sources. Wikipedia provides plenty of external links here.
I could write way too much about this because this book is just so wrong on just about everything. If you want a tl;dr just read the bolded parts.
By the way, this may help explain why the demographics of libertarianism is overwhelmingly white American men. They claim they're not racist, but they think that the United States shouldn't have gotten involved in World War II or the US Civil War!
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