Lawrence W. Reed is president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education, where he served twelve years as president. Before that he ran the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan for twenty-one years, led a think tank in Idaho for three, and taught economics and history at Northwood University for seven. History is his first love and economics a close second, which is the shape of all nine of his books. The newest is Born of Ideas: How Principles, Faith, and Courage Forged America.
Jenny Beth Martin is the host of The Jenny Beth Show, co-founder of the Tea Party movement, and Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.
Key topics:
- The Mayflower Compact of 1620, and why it is the first governing agreement in world history that no monarch signed
- The fifty strangers the investors put on the ship, and the storm that made the compact necessary
- The Flushing Remonstrance of 1657, written by people who were not Quakers on behalf of Quakers
- Congress could not tax, so Congress printed, and by 1780 the continental dollar bought nothing
- The British warship that anchored off Staten Island and ran counterfeit American currency ashore
- How the best ideas of the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening arrived at the same conclusion at the same time
- Why the Boston Tea Party was never an argument about the amount of the tax
- The French Revolution began fourteen years after ours and went somewhere else entirely
- The sin of presentism, and the Wright brothers test for judging people of the past
- Nathan Hale at twenty-one, disguised as a Dutch schoolteacher
- Kosciuszko, Pulaski, Salomon, and a nineteen-year-old Lafayette who broke his own country's law to get here
- Mercy Otis Warren, the conscience of the American Revolution
- Thomas Paine, a bankrupt corset maker, writes Common Sense in January 1776
- Esther Reed raises three hundred thousand dollars in private voluntary funds for the troops
- Twenty-seven American ships against two hundred fifty British ones, and the letters of marque
- John Witherspoon, the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, who saved Princeton twice
- Why the founders gave us a republic with democratic elements and not a democracy
Timestamps:
00:18 — Meet Lawrence Reed: Foundation for Economic Education, the Mackinac Center, nine books
01:57 — Born of Ideas: from the Mayflower Compact in 1620 to the Bill of Rights in 1791
03:17 — The Mayflower Compact, and the first governing agreement in history without a monarch
06:59 — The religious Magna Carta: the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657
09:57 — Congress could not tax, so Congress printed: the continental dollar collapse
12:36 — The British warship Phoenix and the counterfeit American currency
14:57 — The Enlightenment, the Great Awakening, and the Boston Tea Party
20:40 — Why the French Revolution went the other way
23:58 — Slavery, presentism, and what actually made America exceptional
29:43 — Nathan Hale at twenty-one
32:31 — Kosciuszko, Pulaski, Salomon, and Lafayette
35:19 — Mercy Otis Warren, the conscience of the American Revolution
37:31 — Thomas Paine and Common Sense
39:57 — Joseph and Esther Reed of Pennsylvania
43:28 — How Washington won a fight he kept losing
47:47 — Black Americans and Native Americans in the Revolution
52:20 — Twenty-seven American ships against two hundred fifty British ones
54:51 — John Witherspoon saves Princeton twice
57:16 — A republic with democratic elements, not a democracy
Links mentioned: jennybethshow.com, teapartypatriots.org, Born of Ideas by Lawrence W. Reed, the Foundation for Economic Education, the National Archives correspondence between Esther Reed and General Washington.