Dear Congressman Hinchey:
Why don't you and your fellow Congressmen deflate your puffed egos and reduce the federal budget by 50% or 60%? The recent bailouts are proof that you don't know what you're doing.
According to the Census Bureau, in 2007 the US government's direct expenditures or obligations were in excess of $2.5 trillion and other federal assistance, including direct loans, guaranteed loans and insurance, was almost $1.2 trillion. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Gross Domestic Product in 2008 was $14.3 trillion. Thus, US government spending is roughly (2.5 + 1.2) / 14.3 = 25.8% of GNP. This suggests that the federal government believes that 1/4 of the time it can make decisions that are better for society than private consumers can.
This past year has seen an escalation of federal government spending. It is hard to keep track of all the bailouts, subsidies, and handouts that the Bush-Obama administration and the US Congress have concocted, but it seems that these amounts substantially increase the percentage of Gross Domestic Product over which the federal government mistakenly imagines itself best fit to manage.
Rather, the 25% in 2007 was way too high. The federal government has proven that it is incompetent. The 25% should be slashed to the 10% it was in 1950.
If Congress has trouble deciding which government agencies to close, I have a suggestion. Since all government programs are useless, just cut randomly. After cutting the size of government to 10% of gdp, the next step would be to reduce taxation to 10% of gdp. Then people who are a lot smarter than you are, the American public, can begin to repair the damage that Congress has wrought. It will take many years because of your incredible stupidity and incompetence.
A 10% federal budget would still be 10% too high, but it would be a step in the right direction.
Sincerely,
Mitchell Langbert
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
America Is No Longer A Moral Nation
Americans remember that their nation was "conceived in liberty" but tend to forget that liberty was based on morality. Morality is not the same thing as charity. A thief can donate his booty to charity, but he is not moral. Aristotle argued that there are moral as well as intellectual virtues. The moral virtues in Aristotle's view were justice, temperance, prudence and courage. Morality, then, depends on justice. Justice means that each producer receives a fair return, and that no producer receives an unearned return.
The Founding Fathers' morality was linked to the Aristotelian philosophy. Liberty in the sense that it once existed in America depended on justice. This was the underlying assumption of John Locke's Second Treatise on Government on which the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were based. Governments are formed for the just reason of protecting life, liberty and property from violence.
The morality of justice is in turn dependent upon truth. For without a willingness to examine the truth justice is not possible. One cannot receive a fair reward if one is not willing to truthfully examine the contribution one has made.
Ever since the beginning of the Republic a sizable contingent of Americans fought the idea of justice. These Americans wanted the public to subsidize them. The way that they were to be subsidized was through the power to create paper money.
Because of the inherent morality of the 19th century American public, the public rejected this attack on moral values. In 1836 President Andrew Jackson abolished the Second Bank of the United States, the precursor of today's Federal Reserve Bank. The American people of 1836 were too moral to tolerate the fraud associated with the central bank.
In the 1930s John Maynard Keynes proposed an economic system whose foundation is the commission of fraud. Employees would be fooled into accepting lower wages through inflation. The nation's universities would be called into service to perpetuate the fraud by claiming non-existent economic expertise that justified the fraud. The media, already controlled by banking and Wall Street interests, were also called into service of the fraud.
The American people could no longer call themselves moral. For the people did not oppose the fraudulent issuance of bank notes. They did not oppose the transfer of wealth from productive labor to speculator and banker because they were afraid. They were afraid of deprivation because the mass media told them to be afraid. They feared for their security. They trusted experts whose motives were corrupt and whose ideas were merely warmed over and elaborated versions of the same claims that banks had made previously.
America stopped being a moral nation. It could no longer claim justice as the foundation of its ideology. And where justice dies, freedom is sure to follow.
A little dishonesty and a small decline in morality are likely to be followed by ever greater lapses. A little cheating is observed, and then someone does a little more. America has become a nation governed by immoral people. Its economy no longer encourages productivity. Its ethical base has deteriorated. Instead of justice, its ideology is theft. Wal-Mart is excoriated for reducing costs. Goldman Sachs is subsidized for stealing and reducing Americans' standards of living.
A nation that has rejected morality and has rejected justice is sure to deteriorate into the kind of nation that favors charity and stealing. Such a society existed in Europe in the Middle Ages. The socialist economy will see decline to the primitive backwardness of the Soviet Union and pre-Tudor England.
The Founding Fathers' morality was linked to the Aristotelian philosophy. Liberty in the sense that it once existed in America depended on justice. This was the underlying assumption of John Locke's Second Treatise on Government on which the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were based. Governments are formed for the just reason of protecting life, liberty and property from violence.
The morality of justice is in turn dependent upon truth. For without a willingness to examine the truth justice is not possible. One cannot receive a fair reward if one is not willing to truthfully examine the contribution one has made.
Ever since the beginning of the Republic a sizable contingent of Americans fought the idea of justice. These Americans wanted the public to subsidize them. The way that they were to be subsidized was through the power to create paper money.
Because of the inherent morality of the 19th century American public, the public rejected this attack on moral values. In 1836 President Andrew Jackson abolished the Second Bank of the United States, the precursor of today's Federal Reserve Bank. The American people of 1836 were too moral to tolerate the fraud associated with the central bank.
In the 1930s John Maynard Keynes proposed an economic system whose foundation is the commission of fraud. Employees would be fooled into accepting lower wages through inflation. The nation's universities would be called into service to perpetuate the fraud by claiming non-existent economic expertise that justified the fraud. The media, already controlled by banking and Wall Street interests, were also called into service of the fraud.
The American people could no longer call themselves moral. For the people did not oppose the fraudulent issuance of bank notes. They did not oppose the transfer of wealth from productive labor to speculator and banker because they were afraid. They were afraid of deprivation because the mass media told them to be afraid. They feared for their security. They trusted experts whose motives were corrupt and whose ideas were merely warmed over and elaborated versions of the same claims that banks had made previously.
America stopped being a moral nation. It could no longer claim justice as the foundation of its ideology. And where justice dies, freedom is sure to follow.
A little dishonesty and a small decline in morality are likely to be followed by ever greater lapses. A little cheating is observed, and then someone does a little more. America has become a nation governed by immoral people. Its economy no longer encourages productivity. Its ethical base has deteriorated. Instead of justice, its ideology is theft. Wal-Mart is excoriated for reducing costs. Goldman Sachs is subsidized for stealing and reducing Americans' standards of living.
A nation that has rejected morality and has rejected justice is sure to deteriorate into the kind of nation that favors charity and stealing. Such a society existed in Europe in the Middle Ages. The socialist economy will see decline to the primitive backwardness of the Soviet Union and pre-Tudor England.
The Panic of 1819
CJ Maloney has written an excellent article on the panic of 1819 for the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Maloney points out that the panic of 1819 resulted from the same kind of central bank and banking incompetence as today's sub-prime crisis but that the policy decisions of 1819 were much smarter, more effective and more moral than Americans are capable of today. Maloney writes:
"It is the unusual that grabs the attention, and the ideas and beliefs of the majority of our ancestors on how best to clean up the mess of 1819 are vastly different from almost everything I see and hear today. From CNBC's cute little money honeys to newspaper op-eds to my coworkers on the trade desk, all cry that the government must do something. Many of the elite from 1819 believed the exact opposite — that government must do nothing.
"...In 1819 America, nobody blamed the effects for the Panic of 1819, they rightly blamed the cause; they blamed (in Caroline Baum's words) the 'friendly central bank.' As Professor John Dobson points out, 'the [central] bank's policies fueled inflation, and it was popularly viewed as a major contributor to the Panic of 1819.' After this encounter with central banks, 'hard money leadership was abundant and influential'.
"The urge to bail out debtors was fought against not only from a practical but from a moral level as well. Besides Tennessee state representative Robert Allen warning his colleagues that 'if people learn that debts can be paid with petitions and fair stories, you will soon have your table crowded' the pages of the influential Pennsylvania Aurora argued that any such bailouts would not only be economically unsound, but unjust, being a special privilege to the debtor.
"While the federal government was a heavy player in the housing speculation — having offered over $23 million in "affordable" but now mostly delinquent loans by 1819 — for the most part it was the state capitals, where much of political power still resided in America's pre-Lincoln days, that were the scenes of battle.
"And not all the states were clamoring for intervention. The Massachusetts legislature in 1820, referring to hastily passed monetary laws that forced people to accept worthless paper bank notes as if they weren't, stated 'the exchange value of notes must be regulated by the community itself, according to public wants and needs'...plus many thought that such monetary measures were pure hubris. Virginia state politician William Selden warned, 'Money itself is an article of transfer. Human legislation on the subject is worse than vain'..."
Read the whole thing here.
"It is the unusual that grabs the attention, and the ideas and beliefs of the majority of our ancestors on how best to clean up the mess of 1819 are vastly different from almost everything I see and hear today. From CNBC's cute little money honeys to newspaper op-eds to my coworkers on the trade desk, all cry that the government must do something. Many of the elite from 1819 believed the exact opposite — that government must do nothing.
"...In 1819 America, nobody blamed the effects for the Panic of 1819, they rightly blamed the cause; they blamed (in Caroline Baum's words) the 'friendly central bank.' As Professor John Dobson points out, 'the [central] bank's policies fueled inflation, and it was popularly viewed as a major contributor to the Panic of 1819.' After this encounter with central banks, 'hard money leadership was abundant and influential'.
"The urge to bail out debtors was fought against not only from a practical but from a moral level as well. Besides Tennessee state representative Robert Allen warning his colleagues that 'if people learn that debts can be paid with petitions and fair stories, you will soon have your table crowded' the pages of the influential Pennsylvania Aurora argued that any such bailouts would not only be economically unsound, but unjust, being a special privilege to the debtor.
"While the federal government was a heavy player in the housing speculation — having offered over $23 million in "affordable" but now mostly delinquent loans by 1819 — for the most part it was the state capitals, where much of political power still resided in America's pre-Lincoln days, that were the scenes of battle.
"And not all the states were clamoring for intervention. The Massachusetts legislature in 1820, referring to hastily passed monetary laws that forced people to accept worthless paper bank notes as if they weren't, stated 'the exchange value of notes must be regulated by the community itself, according to public wants and needs'...plus many thought that such monetary measures were pure hubris. Virginia state politician William Selden warned, 'Money itself is an article of transfer. Human legislation on the subject is worse than vain'..."
Read the whole thing here.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Letter to Congressman Maurice Hinchey Re Congressional Dress Code
Dear Congressman Hinchey:
I urge you to propose a bill that would require all members of Congress to wear the clown nose pictured above. This will fit Congress's competence and intellectual level of development.
Please consider proposing this dress code. It would be the most intelligent legislation you ever proposed.
Sincerely,
Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Bill O'Reilly: Socialist
Newsmax recently reported that Bill O'Reilly says that he despises the way that the media treats President Barack H. Obama with kid gloves but that conservatives are wrong to call President Obama a socialist.
It may surprise Mr. O'Reilly to learn that by 1912 previouly Republican but by then Progressive Theodore Roosevelt's platform had become socialist. Roosevelt favored federal government price setting. Legislation authorizing the federal government's setting of railroad rates had been passed in 1906, during Roosevelt's Republican administration.
Similarly, President Obama has been busily bossing around automobile companies and providing trillions in subsidies to his cronies in investment banks like Goldman Sachs. The American approach to socialism of TR and BO has always been socialism of the rich.
Dictionary.com defines socialism is defined as "a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole". Would not firing the president of General Motors qualify as outright socialism?
Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Jackson would have been shocked at the lumbering Leviathan government that Mr. O'Reilly and his colleagues at Fox favor. Jackson in particular would have been disturbed at Mr. O'Reilly's silence about the role of the socialist Federal Reserve Bank in bleeding and wrecking the American economy. As in Jackson's day, today's Fed is emblematic of American socialism for the rich.
In a recent discussion of libertarianism Mr. O'Reilly claimed that the government must focus on the "public good". But President Jefferson would not have agreed that bailouts, social security or welfare programs contribute to the public good. Not much has changed since. Today, the economic contribution of the majority of contributors to social security is less than the economic value of the benefits they will receive. Social security was a pyramid scheme that transferred wealth from the 21st to the 20th century. And the chief function of Mr. Obama's socialist government, as would have been in Jefferson's day had the Federalists and the Whigs had their way, is to steal from the public in the interest of subsidizing bankers, a policy that the socialist Obama administration and Mr. O'Reilly support.
It may surprise Mr. O'Reilly to learn that by 1912 previouly Republican but by then Progressive Theodore Roosevelt's platform had become socialist. Roosevelt favored federal government price setting. Legislation authorizing the federal government's setting of railroad rates had been passed in 1906, during Roosevelt's Republican administration.
Similarly, President Obama has been busily bossing around automobile companies and providing trillions in subsidies to his cronies in investment banks like Goldman Sachs. The American approach to socialism of TR and BO has always been socialism of the rich.
Dictionary.com defines socialism is defined as "a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole". Would not firing the president of General Motors qualify as outright socialism?
Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Jackson would have been shocked at the lumbering Leviathan government that Mr. O'Reilly and his colleagues at Fox favor. Jackson in particular would have been disturbed at Mr. O'Reilly's silence about the role of the socialist Federal Reserve Bank in bleeding and wrecking the American economy. As in Jackson's day, today's Fed is emblematic of American socialism for the rich.
In a recent discussion of libertarianism Mr. O'Reilly claimed that the government must focus on the "public good". But President Jefferson would not have agreed that bailouts, social security or welfare programs contribute to the public good. Not much has changed since. Today, the economic contribution of the majority of contributors to social security is less than the economic value of the benefits they will receive. Social security was a pyramid scheme that transferred wealth from the 21st to the 20th century. And the chief function of Mr. Obama's socialist government, as would have been in Jefferson's day had the Federalists and the Whigs had their way, is to steal from the public in the interest of subsidizing bankers, a policy that the socialist Obama administration and Mr. O'Reilly support.
The Chinese Were Suckered
The Chinese have embarrassed themselves. They believed that export-led growth was possible for a nation with a billion citizens. Export-led growth is fine for Japan or Korea, but China is so big that exports can account for only a small portion of the working population. Moreover, technological and scientific improvement limits the importance of labor-intensive industry. Export-led growth is fine to a point, but ultimately the comparative advantage of low labor costs needs to be surpassed by growth in human capital and technology, leading to competitive industry. With the largest potential market in the world, why would not China think in terms of developing the capacity to market internally? This would imply distributed growth, possibly based on the extent of export led growth that it has already experienced.
This would be accomplished through free market capitalist development whereby credit is widely distributed and entrepreneurship rewarded, free of taxation. The Chinese could accomplish this with a gold standard.
Instead, the Chinese allowed themselves to be suckered by Wall Street investment bankers and the US. The philosophical reason is likely this: the Chinese are still Marxists, and they believe that capitalism depends on exploitation. It seemed to them that in order to grow, their workers needed to be exploited. So they focused on low, exploitative labor costs. Then, they allowed Wall Street and its employees in the Fed and in Congress to convince them to invest in dollars, further reducing the cost of their exports. Thus, the Chinese have voluntarily cheated their workforce out of wages in order to subsidize American consumers and Wall Street.
Unfortunately for the United States, though, its public has been bamboozled into the same Wall Street scam: the advocacy of paper money expansion, high taxes and allocation of credit to foolish big business uses such as the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, Long Term Capital Management of the 1990s and the sub-prime bailout fiasco of the 2000's. This has led to a steady reduction in Americans' standard of living, a declining real hourly wage, as politically connected Wall Street opportunists make off with the cream of fresh Federal Reserve Bank reserves. The waste balloons larger as the "conservative"/"liberal" debate, better called the "Progressive"/"progressive" debate, grows ever more insipid, ever less relevant. American political debate has declined to the point where the news is communicated by bungling, drooling cretins who do not understand any of the issues.
Americans lack the intellectual curiosity or the motivation to question the Keynesian, pro-banker model. American politicians have squandered America's wealth on incompetently conceived and executed programs whose main purpose is to waste money. Americans do not raise an eyebrow that 50% of their earnings go to subsidize foolish government programs that produce value equal to 5% of their earnings. Americans are too busy watching "Entertainment Tonight" to care.
The Chinese have the potential to become the leading global power. They can achieve this by following common sense. Their call for a new currency was common sense. But they continue to be suckered by Keynesian double talk and lies. The new currency should be gold. It should be objective. It should not be subject to political manipulation as would a new paper currency. It should not be subject to the opinions of greedy bankers who do not know how to produce value.
I urge the Chinese to adopt the gold standard and the capitalist economic system. Capitalism does not mean exploitation. It means increasing wealth. When freed of the disruptions of paper money, it functions better than any other system.
This would be accomplished through free market capitalist development whereby credit is widely distributed and entrepreneurship rewarded, free of taxation. The Chinese could accomplish this with a gold standard.
Instead, the Chinese allowed themselves to be suckered by Wall Street investment bankers and the US. The philosophical reason is likely this: the Chinese are still Marxists, and they believe that capitalism depends on exploitation. It seemed to them that in order to grow, their workers needed to be exploited. So they focused on low, exploitative labor costs. Then, they allowed Wall Street and its employees in the Fed and in Congress to convince them to invest in dollars, further reducing the cost of their exports. Thus, the Chinese have voluntarily cheated their workforce out of wages in order to subsidize American consumers and Wall Street.
Unfortunately for the United States, though, its public has been bamboozled into the same Wall Street scam: the advocacy of paper money expansion, high taxes and allocation of credit to foolish big business uses such as the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, Long Term Capital Management of the 1990s and the sub-prime bailout fiasco of the 2000's. This has led to a steady reduction in Americans' standard of living, a declining real hourly wage, as politically connected Wall Street opportunists make off with the cream of fresh Federal Reserve Bank reserves. The waste balloons larger as the "conservative"/"liberal" debate, better called the "Progressive"/"progressive" debate, grows ever more insipid, ever less relevant. American political debate has declined to the point where the news is communicated by bungling, drooling cretins who do not understand any of the issues.
Americans lack the intellectual curiosity or the motivation to question the Keynesian, pro-banker model. American politicians have squandered America's wealth on incompetently conceived and executed programs whose main purpose is to waste money. Americans do not raise an eyebrow that 50% of their earnings go to subsidize foolish government programs that produce value equal to 5% of their earnings. Americans are too busy watching "Entertainment Tonight" to care.
The Chinese have the potential to become the leading global power. They can achieve this by following common sense. Their call for a new currency was common sense. But they continue to be suckered by Keynesian double talk and lies. The new currency should be gold. It should be objective. It should not be subject to political manipulation as would a new paper currency. It should not be subject to the opinions of greedy bankers who do not know how to produce value.
I urge the Chinese to adopt the gold standard and the capitalist economic system. Capitalism does not mean exploitation. It means increasing wealth. When freed of the disruptions of paper money, it functions better than any other system.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Why Is CNN Telling the Truth?
I was working out today and someone had turned on CNN. I was stunned that CNN was warning of an attack on the dollar and a dollar crash. This has been true for some time (I have been blogging about this for several years) but I was stunned that CNN is openly discussing this. China, Russia, the EU and other countries have denounced the Bush-Obama bailout and the massive stock market subsidy that the Bush-Obama administrations have effected. Moreover, CNN allowed a speaker to say that Obama would be a one-term president.
But why is CNN willing to cover this? CNN reflects establishment, and it is certainly in the establishment's interest to lie about the very shaky ground on which the American monetary and financial system rests.
I am back in the stock and gold markets. I got into the stock market at S&P 760 or so a few days before the 500 point run up about 8 days ago. I got into gold stocks and gold over the past few days.
Howard S. Katz's "conservative" portfolio is now only a few percent below its October 2007 level. I have fared worse on my own. My total accounts are down about 15% since October 2007. Katz is very bullish on gold stocks right now. He is also bullish on the stock market. I am close to 100% invested for the first time since 2005.
In the 1930s Franklin D. Roosevelt created an economic system based on virtually unlimited power on the part of financial interests, especially Wall Street and commercial banks. He did this by ending the gold standard and permitting an unrestricted fractional reserve approach whereby the Fed has unlimited power to expand the money supply. The Republicans jumped on board with this system in 1971 when Richard M. Nixon abolished the international gold standard that had been reintroduced in 1944.
In 2008 George W. Bush and in 2009 Barack H. Obama intensified the approach. Instead of government by banks, they introduced government by Goldman Sachs. The
Secretary of Treasury under President Bush, Henry Paulson, was a former Goldman executive. Barack Obama received heavy contributions from Goldman. The Bush-Obama administration ensured that all of Goldman's debtors would receive considerable bailout money. Goldman Sachs is the nexus around which all the recipients of the bailouts revolve.
I am trying to figure out whether the US government is worth seriously discussing any more. I am also having trouble deciding whether the Republicans and Democrats have a grain of difference between them. American conservatives and American progressives have one allegiance: the corporate charter of Goldman Sachs.
But why is CNN willing to cover this? CNN reflects establishment, and it is certainly in the establishment's interest to lie about the very shaky ground on which the American monetary and financial system rests.
I am back in the stock and gold markets. I got into the stock market at S&P 760 or so a few days before the 500 point run up about 8 days ago. I got into gold stocks and gold over the past few days.
Howard S. Katz's "conservative" portfolio is now only a few percent below its October 2007 level. I have fared worse on my own. My total accounts are down about 15% since October 2007. Katz is very bullish on gold stocks right now. He is also bullish on the stock market. I am close to 100% invested for the first time since 2005.
In the 1930s Franklin D. Roosevelt created an economic system based on virtually unlimited power on the part of financial interests, especially Wall Street and commercial banks. He did this by ending the gold standard and permitting an unrestricted fractional reserve approach whereby the Fed has unlimited power to expand the money supply. The Republicans jumped on board with this system in 1971 when Richard M. Nixon abolished the international gold standard that had been reintroduced in 1944.
In 2008 George W. Bush and in 2009 Barack H. Obama intensified the approach. Instead of government by banks, they introduced government by Goldman Sachs. The
Secretary of Treasury under President Bush, Henry Paulson, was a former Goldman executive. Barack Obama received heavy contributions from Goldman. The Bush-Obama administration ensured that all of Goldman's debtors would receive considerable bailout money. Goldman Sachs is the nexus around which all the recipients of the bailouts revolve.
I am trying to figure out whether the US government is worth seriously discussing any more. I am also having trouble deciding whether the Republicans and Democrats have a grain of difference between them. American conservatives and American progressives have one allegiance: the corporate charter of Goldman Sachs.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Howard Roark versus Frank Lloyd Wright
In a senior seminar I have been teaching I introduce the students to some basic economics, namely that of Henry Hazlitt and Friedrich Hayek, and then discuss ideas about success in authors with varied ideological views such as Reinhard Bendix, David McClelland and David Riesmann. We then discuss popular success literature including that of Benjamin Franklin, Elbert Hubbard, Dale Carnegie, Stephen Covey and Napoleon Hill. Then we analyze the character of Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's Fountainhead in light of economic, sociological and popular ideas about success.
If you haven't read Ayn Rand's novel, The Fountainhead, consider it. As good is her novel Atlas Shrugged. One point that students sometimes raise is whether Howard Roark is meant to be Frank Lloyd Wright. What are the similarities and differences between Howard Roark and the real life Frank Lloyd Wright?
I checked out Great Buildings.com's page on Frank Lloyd Wright.
Wright's architecture, such as that of the Edgar J. Kauffman residence, Falling Water pictured above, is unique. Wright's work lives up to Rand's euphoric descriptions of Howard Roark's. Like Roark, Wright left college without graduating (in the novel Roark is thrown out of architecture school but Wright dropped out of the University of Wisconsin). From there, Roark goes directly to work for the Louis Sullivan character, Henry Cameron. Louis Sullivan was the real life architect who said "form follows function," which Rand attributes to Cameron on page 45 of the novel. The real life Wright went to work for the firm of J.L. Silsbee before going to work for Adler and Sullivan.
In the novel, Roark builds moderate income housing and invents new architectural forms and approaches in the Sullivan mode. According to the website:
"Wright evolved a new concept of interior space in architecture. Rejecting the existing view of rooms as single-function boxes, Wright created overlapping and interpenetrating rooms with shared spaces...Through experimentation, Wright developed the idea of the prairie house...
"...Wright responded to the need for low income housing with the Usonian house, a development from his earlier prairie house."
One quote from Wright on the site sounds something like something we might expect Roark to say:
"Our schools today, busy turning out 'the common man,' seem to be making conformity a law of his nature...and the old adage—'those who can, do, those who can't teach..'—was never more truly descriptive of purveyors of 'the higher education' in architecture. Life-long I have been shocked by the human deficiency capitalized by American education."
I think you will enjoy the photos at Great Buildings.com. Rand describes Roark's designs in a way that sounds like Wright's.
Like the fictional Roark, Wright built several temples and chapels, such as the Unity Temple in Oak Park Illinois and the Unitarian Meeting House in Madison, Wisconsin. However, unlike Roark, the temples were not destroyed by John Dewey or Lewis Mumford (in the novel Ellsworth Toohey, whose name rhymes with John Dewey but seems to be something like Lewis Mumford-an influential social and architectural critic who lived in the 1920s-has the Stoddard Temple reworked into a nursing home). Also, unlike Roark, as far as I could tell Wright didn't build any New York City skyscrapers and did not live in New York City, which was Rand's adopted home (Rand had emigrated from the USSR). The only skyscrapers shown on the Great Buildings site are the Johnson Wax headquarters building in Racine, Wisconsin and the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. It is unfortunate that Wright did not design any of the major skyscrapers in New York City, although the Guggenheim Museum is ample testimony to Wright's imagination.
Here are some of my favorites:
Martin House, Buffalo, 1904
Guggenheim Museum 1959
Pfieffer Chapel 1938 and here
Walker Residence, Carmel California, 1948
Jacobs House, Madison, Wisconsin, 1936.
Several of these structures bring tears to my eyes. Wright's work resonates with the triumph of the human spirit, but he was criticized for excessive individuality.
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