About Burt Folsom

Free market ideas are in short supply. I am a professor of history at Hillsdale College, a fine institution that takes no federal funds and turns out a fine crop of about 300 graduates each year. I am also a columnist and the historian-in-residence at the Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington, New York.

My two main books are The Myth of the Robber Barons (five editions, Young America’s Foundation), and New Deal or Raw Deal: How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America (Simon & Schuster, 2008). These two books explore the positive effects of entrepreneurs and limited government on the rise of the U. S. in the late 1800s–and the disastrous effects of massive federal spending under Franklin Roosevelt during the New Deal years of the 1930s.