Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

I want to begin this section by summing up my background with regard to knowledge of banking, finance, and economics. I've never taken economics, accounting, or business course. My knowledge of economics comes from reading Adam Smith--cover to cover and some commentary on his writing; most notably from the book "The Worldly Philosophers." I read several books on economics after the 2008 financial collapse, I've seen the Enron documentary "the Smartest Guys in the Room" because that was one of the very few things available on one of the HD channels when those were new. I teach business ethics and have learned a great deal about how business and economies relate from all of the research that I have done to prepare for that course. I also have a considerable understanding of how people like Gary Allen think economics works from all of the conspiracy bullshit I have to read and all of the Ron Paul Libertarians I've dealt with that think "money" is

 New chapter title: The Money Manipulators This is appropriate because the first thing we begin with is discussing history professors and their textbooks. Allen begins, " Many college history professors tell their charges that the books they will be using in the class are 'objective.' But stop to ask yourself: Is it possible to write a history book without a particular point of view?" First off: bullshit. No one teaches a history class and says, this book is just plain facts. It simply doesn't happen. An objective history book would be a date, a time (if possible), and then the event that happened. The battle of Savo Island took place on August 8th, 1942, it involved these sides with this many on each side, and the Japanese Navy claimed victory. That's what an objective historical report looks like. That little window on the side of the wiki entry is the objective entry. Anything else and you begin to enter biases into it. Every historian going back to Herodot

Page 34 ended with this gem, "Jefferson knew that if the government were not enslaved the people would be."--that's a fun claim about Thomas Jefferson.  Moving forward, and still waiting for those Socialist policies of Richard Nixon to be enumerated, we move to a fake coffee sit down with the "man in the street." This is never a good sign because what always follows is the strawest of strawmen or the easiest setup for a softball. Even the book isn't disingenuous to pretend that this isn't going to be one of those things, " he might say: 'the one thing that I can never figure out is why all these very, very wealthy people like the Kennedy's, the Fords, the Rockefellers and others are for socialism..."  The fake quote comments how these families would have the most to lose from Socialism while this fictitious person has the least to lose but is against it. A lot is going on here, but most notably, it's the appeal to "common sense

 Apologies for last week, I spent it away from both the internet and electricity. The former wasn't so bad but that latter was rough. We left off discussing the socialist policies of Richard Nixon, and how absurd it was that Allen didn't mention what policies he felt were too socialist. A friend of mine, who I consider an amateur presidential historian (and that is NOT meant to be an insult) listed a few of them for me.  This friend informed me that Nixon tried a few things: a guaranteed minimum income and during his presidency universal health care was first floated as an idea (Nixon was personally against this though according to tapes of his own voice). There's quite a decent amount of accomplishments from Nixon that we could think Allen is referring to as our inevitable march toward COMMUNISM; but as I responded to my friend's helpful suggestions, it's Allen's book--we should not have to work this hard to figure it out. What I suspect is that if he named the