These three readings of the works of Laurence W. Reed, by Stefan Molyneux, along with accompanying dystopian film clips, are among the cleanest presentations of economic predation by politicians that I have been able to find. The Depression, as described in Reed's words, seems to be either a debacle stumbled into and made worse by rank amateurs in political power, or an engineered economic collapse, depending on whether you are an economist like Reed or an ancient alien theorist such as myself.

The lecture on the Great Depression is excellent. The other piece is an article comparing the decline and fall of Rome with symptoms of America’s decline that should be easily accessible to those meatheads among us.