Ep. 2657 Phil Gramm on Dumb Myths About Capitalism
The Tom Woods Show
Tom Woods
4.8 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 June 2025
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Virtually everyone -- sadly, even on the right these days -- believes things that are demonstrably false about the Industrial Revolution, inequality, trade, poverty, and plenty more. Former US Senator (and economics professor) Phil Gramm joins us to correct the record.
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Book Discussed: The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Get ready to take a flamethrower to the official narrative and learn what the elites don't want you to know. |
| 0:08.8 | You're listening to the Tom Woods Show. |
| 0:18.5 | Hi everybody, Tom Woods here. It's episode 2657 of the Tom Woods show, and I'm delighted to welcome a former U.S. Senator Phil Graham, whom you all know, no doubt. And I would say a particularly distinguished feature of his bio is that it's rare, it's a rare phenomenon that an economics professor, which he was at |
| 0:39.5 | Texas A&M University, goes on to become a U.S. Congressman and Senator, as Phil Graham did. |
| 0:46.1 | And I want to talk to him today about a brand new book he has with Don Boudreau, who's been a guest |
| 0:51.6 | on this program also. It's called The Triumph of Economic Freedom, Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism. |
| 0:58.2 | Senator Graham, welcome to the show. |
| 1:00.2 | Oh, thank you, Tom. |
| 1:01.6 | All right, let's start it. |
| 1:02.8 | I love this book because these are seven myths that make me crazy. |
| 1:07.7 | Yeah, well, they're the seven great myths of American capitalism. |
| 1:11.6 | So if you understand American markets and how they work and American history and the role that capitalism has played, these seven myths to irritate you. |
| 1:24.6 | Well, you start right in a way from the beginning because the controversy over the |
| 1:30.3 | industrial revolution, you know, has existed for some time, and there was a debate called |
| 1:35.8 | the standard of living debate, and the historians on either side were known as the optimists |
| 1:40.8 | and the pessimists. And I think on balance, the historians came out on balance |
| 1:46.8 | on the optimist side, but I think the general public never found out about any of that. |
| 1:51.5 | So the general public just remembers, well, I saw some really terrible drawings in my history |
| 1:57.1 | book about how bad the conditions were. so the Industrial Revolution must have been a |
| 2:01.6 | catastrophe for people, and yet, turns out this is not exactly an accurate rendering of what happened. |
| 2:09.0 | Well, I'd say it's about as far from the truth as it could be. |
| 2:14.3 | Fortunately, we have British and American statistics from roughly 1800 on, and in Britain especially, |
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