Tom Woods

Tom Woods - Quick Facts

Profile Overview of Tom Woods

Thomas Ernest Woods Jr. (born August 1, 1972) is an American author, podcast host, and libertarian commentator who is currently a senior fellow at the Mises Institute. A proponent of the Austrian School of economics, Woods hosts a podcast, The Tom Woods Show, and formerly co-hosted the weekly podcast Contra Krugman.

This profile of Tom Woods covers Education and Training, Career and Rise to Fame, Libertarianism, U.S. Constitution and Conservatism.

Woods' The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History in 2004 interpreted U.S. History through a paleoconservative and, as described by some writers, pro-Confederate lens. This, and his 2009 book Meltdown on the 2008 financial crisis, became New York Times bestsellers. His subsequent writing has focused on promoting libertarianism and libertarian leaning political figures such as former Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul. Woods also teaches homeschooling courses on Western civilization and government called The Liberty Homeschooler as part of the Ron Paul Curriculum.

Education and Training of Tom Woods

Woods holds a BA from Harvard (1994) and an MPhil and PhD from Columbia (2000), all in history. His thesis became The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era, which he says "has nothing to do with libertarianism."

Career and Rise to Fame of Tom Woods

Woods is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute and is on the editorial board for the institute's Libertarian Papers. He was a founding member of the League of the South (see § Affiliation with League of the South, which he has since denounced. Woods was a Richard M. Weaver Fellow at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 1995 and 1996. In August 2020, Woods joined the advisory board of the Mises Caucus political action committee where he continues advising as of April 10, 2022.

Woods is the author of 20 books. Two of his books, Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and Meltdown were on The New York Times Best Seller list in 2005 and 2009, respectively. At the time he wrote Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, he was teaching at Suffolk County Community College on Long Island, New York.

Woods' articles have appeared in publications including The American Historical Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Investor's Business Daily, Modern Age, American Studies, Journal of Markets & Morality, New Oxford Review, The Freeman, The Independent Review, Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines, AD2000, Crisis, Human Rights Review, Catholic Historical Review, the Catholic Social Science Review, The Latin Mass: A Journal of Catholic Culture, and The American Conservative.

Libertarianism

Tom Woods subscribes to the libertarian strain of thought known as the Rothbardian or anarcho-capitalist worldview which asserts that individual rights, property rights, peace, the free market, and the nonaggression principle are paramount and that collectivism, violence, and coercion should be opposed. Like some anarcho-capitalists, Woods has stated that his anarchism is philosophical in nature, rather than practical; pragmatically, Woods has referred to himself as a "pragmatic minarchist" and Jeffersonian democrat. Woods' view of libertarianism emphasizes the importance of agorism (a belief that is popular with many left-libertarians), alternative currencies (such as cryptocurrency and precious metals), and political activism to reduce state power.

U.S. Constitution

Woods co-authored Who Killed the Constitution? With Kevin Gutzman, Professor of History at Western Connecticut State University. Woods and Gutzman criticize what they view as unconstitutional political overreach spanning from World War I to the Obama administration. Woods has promoted the views of Lysander Spooner, who argued that the Constitution holds no authority because the public has not explicitly consented to it and because the Federal Government in his view has not followed its obligations and limits.

Woods advocates the compact theory and promotes the legal theory of nullification, which, he has said, was espoused by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. In his book Nullification, he details the history of and justification for nullification and its adoption by various political movements including abolitionists, slave holders, and those opposed to tariffs. He goes on to suggest nullification as a tool that states can use to check the powers of the federal government. As such, Woods is a supporter of the Tenth Amendment Center, which aims to resist what it views as federal overreach through state action.

Woods views the Bill of Rights as a limitation solely on federal power, and not on the power of the states. In an article for the Southern Partisan magazine in 1997 Woods writes: "The Bill of Rights, moreover, erroneously invoked by modern Civil Libertarians, was never intended to protect individuals from the state governments. Jefferson is far from alone in insisting that only the federal government is restricted from regulating the press, church-state relations, and so forth. The states may do as they wish in these areas."

Conservatism

In a 2011 interview, Woods said that he entered Harvard as a "middle-of-the-road Republican, the thing that drives me most berserk today" and then later became a "fully-fledged libertarian." He has criticized those he deems neoconservative and previously identified himself as traditional conservative.

Woods' Politically Incorrect Guide to American History is described as having neo-Confederate themes; in it, "Woods contends that slavery was benign", according to the book Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction. It was scathingly reviewed by commentator Max Boot of The Weekly Standard. Boot accused Woods of being overly sympathetic with Southerners such as John C. Calhoun and their belief in a state's right to secede and in state nullification, while exaggerating the militarism of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Bill Clinton. Woods responded by criticizing Boot as an embodiment of "everything that is wrong with modern conservatism." Historian David Greenberg dismissed the book as "a brisk tour of U.S. History from Colonial to Clintonian times, filtered through a lens of far-right dogma, circa 1939" that is "incorrect in more than just its politics" and that "would be tedious to debunk." Judge James Haley, by contrast, praised the book in the conservative Weekly Standard as "a compelling rebuttal to the liberal sentiment encrusted upon current history texts."

In a 1995 The Freeman article, Woods has argued that open-border immigration policies are incompatible with libertarian property-rights theory, contending that unrestricted immigration can infringe on homeowners' property rights.

Economics

Woods has been an advocate of hard money, and is critical of the Federal Reserve and other central banks which he views as responsible for unnatural inflation and the business cycle. Economist Steven Horwitz has pointed out that Woods' monetary theory and definitions of inflation and deflation rely on a Rothbardian 100% reserve requirement, which is not the only perspective in the Austrian School.

Woods believes that the gender pay gap results because "women often intend to leave the labor force for extended periods of time to have children, they do not consider certain high-paying fields where their knowledge would be obsolete after so long an absence."

Woods has been highly critical of Keynesian economics. Woods co-hosted the Contra Krugman podcast (from September 2015 to June 2020) with economist Robert P. Murphy, which critiqued Nobel Prize winning New Keynesian economist Paul Krugman's Times columns through the lens of free market Austrian economics and said it taught economics "by uncovering and dissecting the errors of Krugman."

Source: adapted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Woods), text available under CC BY-SA 4.0.