The Little House on the Parade

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The Little House in the Prairie series was marketed as a true life story of Laura Ingalls Wilder growing up on the American frontier. The books were actually written by her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, who was a libertarian ideologue. And she took her mother's stories and crafted them as libertarian parables of success through hard work, individualism. Their story of the attempt to thrive on the plains was actually a story of repeated failures, but it's reconstructed into a success story with their own hard labor.

Shermer and Oreskes discuss: the myth of market magic • market fundamentalism • market absolutism • market essentialism • capitalism and democracy • well-regulated vs. poorly regulated capitalism • U.S. Constitution and capitalism • what the founding fathers believed about markets • what Adam Smith really said about markets and capitalism and how economists rewrote Adam Smith • why markets need regulation in the same way sports need rules and referees • rhetorical fallacies of market fundamentalists • child labor laws • bank failures • Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 • Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman • religion and capitalism • think tanks • collective action problems.

Naomi Oreskes is Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and many other outlets. Her TED talk, “Why We Should Trust Scientists,” was viewed more than a million times. Erik M. Conway is a historian of science and technology and works for the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of seven books and dozens of articles and essays. Their new book is The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.