Great Myths of the Great Depression

FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate

How Government Prolonged the Depression

“In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all — regardless of station, or race or creed.

Among these are: (more…)

Statists have launched bloody revolutions followed by violent periods of terror in France, Russia, Germany, China, and elsewhere, always under the flags of democratic populism, Marxism, national socialism, and fascism.  For the Statist, revolution is an ongoing enterprise, for it regularly cleanses society of religious dogma, antiquated traditions, backward customs, and ambitious individuals who differ with or obstruct the Statist’s plans.  The Statist calls this many things, including “progressive.”  For the rest, it is tyranny.

Mark R. Levin, Liberty and Tyranny (New York: Simon  & Schuster, 2009), 30.

“Excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state’s omnipotence is another possible mistake.

True, the state’s increased role in times of crisis is a natural reaction to market setbacks. Instead of streamlining market mechanisms, some are tempted to expand state economic intervention to the greatest possible extent.

The concentration of surplus assets in the hands of the state is a negative aspect of anti-crisis measures in virtually every nation.

In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.

Nor should we turn a blind eye to the fact that the spirit of free enterprise, including the principle of personal responsibility of businesspeople, investors and shareholders for their decisions, is being eroded in the last few months. There is no reason to believe that we can achieve better results by shifting responsibility onto the state.

And one more point: anti-crisis measures should not escalate into financial populism and a refusal to implement responsible macroeconomic policies. The unjustified swelling of the budgetary deficit and the accumulation of public debts are just as destructive as adventurous stock-jobbing.”

The following text is a transcript of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s speech at the opening ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Putins speaks at Davos

Samuel Huntington wrote,

“Political leaders imbued with the hubris to think that they can fundamentally reshape the culture of their societies are destined to fail. While they can introduce elements of Western culture, they are unable permanently to suppress or eliminate the core elements of their indigenous culture.  Conversely, the Western virus, once it is lodged in another society, is difficult to expunge. The virus persists but is not fatal; the patient survives but is never whole. Political leaders can make history but they cannot escape history. They produce torn countries; they do not create Western societies. They infect their country with a cultural schizophrenia which becomes its continuing and defining characteristic.”

I think Huntington’s view is correct.  Assuming it is, we can adapt his principle to ourselves as follows. Our American culture is founded on individual liberty as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Freedom, and all of the consequences, legal expressions and behaviors that flow from the foundation of freedom make up the historical and dominant culture of America. Socialism is opposed to freedom because it requires that the freedom of all citizens be abridged to support the state’s redistribution of wealth, and the state’s behavioral dictates. And politicians who impose socialism on America may temporarily succeed in suppressing freedom, do economic damage, inflict poverty and create harm.  Ultimately, however, our American culture of freedom will re-surge and prevail.  Our cultural nature is the dominant force that we cannot escape.

No matter how many socialist programs the American left pile up, the nature of their programs will remain opposed to our culture. I admire the left’s tenacity and passion, however, I really wish they would apply their efforts to something that had the potential to actually succeed.

Pay close attention as the stimulus package results come in. Blame will be liberally doled out to Bush, conservatives, Bush, Republicans, Bush, Christians, Bush and um, oh yeah, Bush. They won’t for a moment recognize the fundamental antagonism between socialism and our free culture.

• The pseudo science of the climate change cartel.
• The pseudo statesmanship of the leftist democrats.
• The pseudo conservatism of republicans.
• The pseudo philosophy of moderates.
• The pseudo intellectualism of the modern university.
• The pseudo religion of fundamentalism — pick your brand.
• The pseudo market of the nationalized no-fault economy.
• The pseudo news from the main stream media.
• The pseudo democracy of the nanny state.
• The pseudo security of the welfare state.
• The pseudo healthcare of socialized medicine.
• The pseudo stewardship of government planners.
• The pseudo sanity of mental health.
• And the pseudo natural born citizen who became president.

People talk about tipping points.  I think Americans have reached a tipping point — one where the pretense of knowledge is piling up faster than factual and reasonable knowledge.  To be sure, the accretion of factual and reasonable knowledge has greatly accelerated with improvements in technology, but it just looks like the poseurs are winning the day in America.  If you read the Victor Davis Hanson piece in the previous entry, as Americans lose their understanding of the liberal arts, they lose their capacity to advance Western civilization.  The barbarians in Mumbai last week and the imams who filled their heads with jihadi mush, acted on this weakness as Americans celebrated Thanksgiving with one eye on the TV.  The slippery slope of cultural coarsening accelerated (again) as terrorists (again) reduced Western civilization to bloody chunks of body parts and (again) shifted our concept of normalcy toward a state of random violence.  The causal thread running through and linking all of this — terrorism, the abrogation of history, the politicizing of all human endeavors — is enabled by disconnection and the interruption of reality feedback.  These conditions are necessary precedents if you want people to stop thinking and acting in the interest of their own survival, and they work especially well for the growing segment of the population unburdened by a conscience.  All that’s required of us is tolerance, and acceptance that the bounds of what must be tolerated continually expand toward the unthinkable, the horrible, the terrible, and whatever new fad the polity wants to try on for size.  Ideals, outcomes, objective measures, standards, fixed points for evaluation, better and worse, good and evil, laws, constitutions, all of these concepts must give way to tolerance.  God forbid we become narrow minded.

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.”  H.L. Mencken (more…)

“Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own Federal and Republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter—with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens—a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.”

From:

Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address

In the Washington, D.C.

Wednesday, March 4, 1801

“Marxism as a serious political system came crashing down with the Berlin Wall in 1990. Aspects of it certainly linger in European-style “social democracy” and in surviving elements of the New Deal in America.  Every time you suffer an energy blackout, for instance, you are probably suffering from the Depression-era laws that let to a fragmented electricity transmission grid in the name of preserving jobs.

Yet the instinct to broadly and aggressively apply the tools of Marxism–central planning and government control–lives on.  The instinct is the same as it was when Marx articulated it in the nineteenth century, but the old justification just doesn’t fly.  Free enterprise has proven itself not to oppress the working man, but to free him.

If the working man is no longer oppressed, the central tenant of Marxism no longer applies, but surely there must be another victim of capitalism to take its place?  Women and minorities have advanced themselves under free enterprise just as surely as have the working man, and so they are not ideal candidates.

Luckily for the Left they have a victim ready on the shelf.  This time it is one that will not exercise free choice in rejecting the ministrations of those who claim to speak for it.  In the leftist’s world view, the worker has been replaced by “the Environment.”

Iain Murray, The Really Inconvenient Truths, Regnery 2008, pp 210-211.

When you least expect it, the most interesting revelations surface. I was discussing some fundamental differences between my positions and positions of the left with some Democrats yesterday. As usually happens in these situations, they grew increasingly impatient with me as I defended my position from compromise. As we parted, they made a reference to their firmly held belief that the French Revolution was the logical outcome of Laissez Faire capitalism. They all held this conclusion as if it were fact, and they tossed off questions to this assumption as they departed as absurd. (more…)

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. (more…)

Getting to Know John McCain

Messages From John

———————————————————————————————–

“Ships carried the captives primarily to the British sugar islands (where more than 70 percent of slaves were purchased, almost half of these at Jamaica), but sizable numbers were also sent to French and Spanish buyers as a result of special treaty arrangements called the Asiento. About one in ten was shipped to North American destinations.” p. 6.

“[T]he ship-factory also produced “race.” At the beginning of the voyage, captains hired a motley crew of sailors, who would, on the coast of Africa, become “white men.” At the beginning of the Middle Passage, captains loaded on board the vessel a multiethnic collection of Africans, who would, in the American port, become “black people” or a “negro race.” The voyage thus transformed those who made it.” p. 10.

From: The Slave Ship, A Human History by Marcus Rediker. ISBN 978-0-670-01823-9.

No one in America today makes that voyage. No one in America today deserves the burden of “race.”