Aug 28, 2026

The Mayflower Compact was signed the day before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, and it is the first agreement on governing between two groups of people in the history of the world that no monarch signed. Lawrence Reed calls it the most meaningful early benchmark in the American story, because everything the Declaration of Independence said so beautifully 156 years later was already there in 1620: mutual consent, toleration, no king. Lawrence W. Reed is president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education, where he served twelve years as president. He ran the Mackinac Center for Public Policy for twenty-one years and taught economics and history at Northwood University. Born of Ideas: How Principles, Faith, and Courage Forged America is his ninth book, and it runs from the Mayflower Compact in 1620 through the Bill of Rights in 1791. Jenny Beth Martin and Lawrence Reed also cover the Flushing Remonstrance of 1657, when townspeople who were not Quakers defied a governor's order to shun the Quakers. The continental dollar Congress printed into worthlessness by 1780, and the British warship off Staten Island that counterfeited American currency by the crate. The sin of presentism and the Wright brothers test. Mercy Otis Warren, whose history Thomas Jefferson required his entire cabinet to read. And why the founders handed us a republic with democratic elements rather than a democracy. This conversation is the lead-in to a four-part series on economics with Lawrence Reed beginning next week. More at jennybethshow.com and teapartypatriots.org.

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