Dear Mark--I was listening to you on my way to NYC from Woodstock, NY. I teach at Brooklyn College. I heard a caller call in somewhat stridently claiming the need for stimulus. You did not question him. His claims about the Great Depression having been resolved by the heavy borrowing of World War II went unrefuted. This is bad.
You cannot cure America's addiction to socialism if you accept socialist monetary and business cycle theory, i.e., Keynesian economic theory. There is no reason to. Keynesian theory was refuted in the 1970s by Milton Friedman. Your caller, and today's economists, and the media, and all advocates of stimulus, the bail out and the recent inflationary monetary expansion by the socialist Bernanke Fed and Ol' Hammer and Sickle George W. Bush (not to mention his Comintern follower, Goosestepping Socialist Barack Obama) are all ignorant fools.
There is no need for stimulus. Stimulus is not the solution. It is the problem. Unemployment did not become a major problem until AFTER the creation of the Fed and stimulus. In a system of free banking and a gold standard business cycles would be muted. They only exist because of the banking system and stimulus. Trying to cure today's problems with government spending, inflation and stimulus is like trying to cure cancer by drinking a bottle of chlorine.
You might consider inviting a guest from the Cato Institute or my old friend Howard S. Katz at (http://www.thegoldbug.net and http://www.thegoldbugnet.com) to educate your listeners about a more realistic approach to the business cycle than the socialist crap that has become a single chorus Democratic and Republican Hammer and Sickle version of L'Internationale.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Friday, February 6, 2009
Americans Are Unfit for Self-Government
President Andrew Jackson suggested that when expedience became the basis on which the Constitution was interpreted, then Americans would no longer be fit for self governance. That day passed a century ago.
I have watched the City of New York, once a great industrial, artistic, cultural, and port center deteriorate and all of its vibrancy wither. It has become a cash cow for real estate and Wall Street interests. All of its innovative callings have fled. This was done in accordance with mandates of the City's democratic vote: urban renewal, taxes, corruption, city projects, expressways, rent control, and mismanagement.
I have watched the nation raise taxes on its citizens so that Americans are no longer free, but are wage slaves to the government, paying half or more of their incomes to corrupt, morally depraved programs like Social Security and the Department of Education.
I have watched Americans accept the debasement of their currency without effort to understand the relationships among banking, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve Bank and diminishing American expectations.
I have watched Americans allow their educational system become a plaything for extremist cranks who indoctrinate, brainwash and defraud, but do not educate.
I have watched Americans passively accept waste and failed bureaucracies: the Department of Labor; the Department of Energy; the Department of Education; the Department of Health Education and Welfare. The taxes extracted to subsidize these are paid without protest by brainwashed fools, made dull witted by the American educational system.
I have watched American culture deteriorate to the point where the flagrant stupidity that passes as entertainment and the ignorance that passes as news shocks and disorients the observer, and makes me wonder about the possibility of some widespread mental contagion.
Because Americans are unfit for self government, they have allowed a succession of special interests, Wall Street, education, employers' associations, labor unions and health care lobbies to dictate spending and taxation levels, government programs and tax systems, silently and smugly accepting the abuses of corrupt lobbies.
If future generations might look back and recall the contribution of 20th century Americans to the course of history, they will remark that this was a people that was given a great nation, and through cupidity and stupidity proved that republicanism does not work.
I have watched the City of New York, once a great industrial, artistic, cultural, and port center deteriorate and all of its vibrancy wither. It has become a cash cow for real estate and Wall Street interests. All of its innovative callings have fled. This was done in accordance with mandates of the City's democratic vote: urban renewal, taxes, corruption, city projects, expressways, rent control, and mismanagement.
I have watched the nation raise taxes on its citizens so that Americans are no longer free, but are wage slaves to the government, paying half or more of their incomes to corrupt, morally depraved programs like Social Security and the Department of Education.
I have watched Americans accept the debasement of their currency without effort to understand the relationships among banking, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve Bank and diminishing American expectations.
I have watched Americans allow their educational system become a plaything for extremist cranks who indoctrinate, brainwash and defraud, but do not educate.
I have watched Americans passively accept waste and failed bureaucracies: the Department of Labor; the Department of Energy; the Department of Education; the Department of Health Education and Welfare. The taxes extracted to subsidize these are paid without protest by brainwashed fools, made dull witted by the American educational system.
I have watched American culture deteriorate to the point where the flagrant stupidity that passes as entertainment and the ignorance that passes as news shocks and disorients the observer, and makes me wonder about the possibility of some widespread mental contagion.
Because Americans are unfit for self government, they have allowed a succession of special interests, Wall Street, education, employers' associations, labor unions and health care lobbies to dictate spending and taxation levels, government programs and tax systems, silently and smugly accepting the abuses of corrupt lobbies.
If future generations might look back and recall the contribution of 20th century Americans to the course of history, they will remark that this was a people that was given a great nation, and through cupidity and stupidity proved that republicanism does not work.
President Andrew Jackson on Infrastructure Improvement
"...I will not detain you with professions of zeal in the cause of internal improvements...for I do not suppose there is an intelligent citizen who does not wish to see them flourish. But though all are their friends, but few, I trust, are unmindful of the means by which they should be promoted; none certainly are so degenerate as to desire their success at the cost of that sacred instrument with the preservation of which is indissolubly bound our country's hopes...When an honest observance of constitutional compacts can not be obtained from communities like ours, it need not be anticipated elsewhere, and the cause in which there has been so much martyrdom, and from which so much was expected by the friends of liberty, may be abandoned, and the degrading truth that man is unfit for self-government admitted. And this will be the case if expediency be made a rule of construction in interpreting the Constitution...."
----President Andrew Jackson, on the veto of the Mayville Road, 1830. In Henry L. Watson, Andrew Jackson vs. Henry Clay, Boston: Bedford St. Martin's, p. 179.
----President Andrew Jackson, on the veto of the Mayville Road, 1830. In Henry L. Watson, Andrew Jackson vs. Henry Clay, Boston: Bedford St. Martin's, p. 179.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Evolution of Progressivism as Elitist Paradigm
The debate between individualists and social democrats centers on the effects of centralization and the scope of rationality. Social democrats or "progressives" argue for enhanced centralization and the possibility of broad rationality in policy making. The rationality is accomplished through elite experts who claim to have superior, scientific knowledge obtained through university education. Individualists, in contrast, argue for the necessity to coordinate economic activity through decentralized, autonomous producers who are coordinated via price and motivated by private property. The debate between advocates of price versus hyper-rationalistic human planning through a centralized government agency would seem to have been settled in the 1980s. None of the socialist states was able to successfully implement centrally planned economies. Moreover, the tyranny associated with communism confirmed the worst fears of Milton Friedman and others. Yet, as late as 1972, when it had become evident that the Chinese communists had murdered approximately 25 million people, leading advocates of rational planning, John Kenneth Galbraith and Wassily Leontief, argued for the virtues of the Chinese communist system in the pages of the New York Times Magazine. Within a decade the Chinese themselves admitted that their approach to communism had failed, yet this had escaped the expertise of American universities' most famous economists. Now, 20 years after the final failure of Soviet communism, American academics and the Democratic Party continue to argue for state coordination and elitist-conceived solutions to elitist-conceived problems.
The question of centralization and decentralization has a long history in the United States. Its advocates hearken back to the ideas of Steuart and Shaftesbury and Hume, who was an anti-rationalist in epistemology and ethics but a rationalist in economics. Alexander Hamilton adopted the ideas of Hume and aimed to implement the mercantilist model. The Federalists believed that elite business people had exceptional rationality so that they could transform paper money into enhanced real wealth. This idea came from Hume. In turn, the elitist centralizing and hyper-rationalist idea was adopted by the Whigs, Henry Clay and then Abraham Lincoln, and carried forward by the Republicans in the form of advocacy of high tariffs and national banking. Although the Republicans voiced the ideology of laissez faire in the late nineteenth century, their reform impulses, as reflected in the National Banking Act, the Morrill Act, high tariffs, and the Pendleton Act reflected a centralizing interest in rationality. In turn, the early twentieth century Progressives advocated rationality and centralization, and this theme was reenforced by the New Deal.
If one looks at the social origins of the centralizing rationalists in American history there was a transformation in the late nineteenth century. Hamilton and Clay were a Federalist and a Whig who came from modest origins. Hamilton was an orphan who had won the support of businessmen in Nevis who financed his education and Clay was from a frontier middle class background, although he claimed to be poor. This was William Henry Harrison's response to the Jacksonian common man ideology of which Louis Hartz writes and that Abraham Lincoln carried forward.
A shift occurred in the Gilded Age. The Mugwumps did not identify themselves as having come from poor backgrounds. Their interest in rationalization of civil service and contempt for corruption was a reaction to Jacksonian democracy. They were college educated and saw themselves as differentiated from the mass of Americans and immigrants because of their education. They conceptualized themselves as a self conscious elite, and were other-directed. Their opposition to James Blaine in 1884 was group and media derived. It was fashionable. Among the Mugwumps was Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt rejected the laissez-faire philosophy of the older Mugwumps and carried forward the view of morality as an elitist obligation. Progressives saw reform as a class-linked moral prerogative. However, Roosevelt also advocated support for big business, centralized authority and the use of rationality as he defined it, for the ends that he defined as moral. The Progressives applied moral skepticism with respect to the natural rights philosophy, but moral dogmatism with respect to their social vision. They were other-directed in that the Progressive vision consisted of ad hoc propositions, news and whim of the elite itself. It claimed to be pragmatic, but refused to permit its dogmas to be falsified. Roosevelt initated a century long claim to superior mental ability of those who advocate the Progressive or liberal dogma.
The claim of superior mental capacity of a superior class follow through Hamilton, Clay and the Mugwumps, into Progressivism and the New Deal. Hamilton and Clay believed with Jefferson that there was a natural aristocracy. Hamilton and Clay both believed that government support for the elite would foster social goals because the elite could best use public wealth. The Mugwumps transformed the claim to superior knowledge from business to control of business via the state. This coincided with the increasing complexity and knowledge required to succeed in business. As technology grew more complex, the centralizing elitist philosophy dispensed with the claim that superior knowledge was needed to found and run business, and transformed into the claim that it was needed to regulate and dominate business.
The Mugwumps were the first group to identify altruistic or moralistic elitist aims. This came about because of their horror at the boss system and what they identified as pathologies of immigration and urbanization--slums and corruption. They sought to rationalize government.
Roosevelt was thus the product of the increasing wealth of American society. Unlike the early nineteenth century Federalists and Whigs, the Progressives made no pretense of humble origins but rather claimed an aristocratic elitism. Jane Addams was a social worker who aimed to altruistically help immigrant poor through a superior social position. Labor was viewed as ineluctably trapped in inferior class status. Class and group differences were viewed as inevitable, with the Progressive leadership expressing the altruism of the elite class. Government support for and rationalization of big business, the good trusts and the Federal Reserve Bank, the Workers' Compensation laws that limited employer liability in the name of altruistic concern for workers expressed the new elitism.
The question of centralization and decentralization has a long history in the United States. Its advocates hearken back to the ideas of Steuart and Shaftesbury and Hume, who was an anti-rationalist in epistemology and ethics but a rationalist in economics. Alexander Hamilton adopted the ideas of Hume and aimed to implement the mercantilist model. The Federalists believed that elite business people had exceptional rationality so that they could transform paper money into enhanced real wealth. This idea came from Hume. In turn, the elitist centralizing and hyper-rationalist idea was adopted by the Whigs, Henry Clay and then Abraham Lincoln, and carried forward by the Republicans in the form of advocacy of high tariffs and national banking. Although the Republicans voiced the ideology of laissez faire in the late nineteenth century, their reform impulses, as reflected in the National Banking Act, the Morrill Act, high tariffs, and the Pendleton Act reflected a centralizing interest in rationality. In turn, the early twentieth century Progressives advocated rationality and centralization, and this theme was reenforced by the New Deal.
If one looks at the social origins of the centralizing rationalists in American history there was a transformation in the late nineteenth century. Hamilton and Clay were a Federalist and a Whig who came from modest origins. Hamilton was an orphan who had won the support of businessmen in Nevis who financed his education and Clay was from a frontier middle class background, although he claimed to be poor. This was William Henry Harrison's response to the Jacksonian common man ideology of which Louis Hartz writes and that Abraham Lincoln carried forward.
A shift occurred in the Gilded Age. The Mugwumps did not identify themselves as having come from poor backgrounds. Their interest in rationalization of civil service and contempt for corruption was a reaction to Jacksonian democracy. They were college educated and saw themselves as differentiated from the mass of Americans and immigrants because of their education. They conceptualized themselves as a self conscious elite, and were other-directed. Their opposition to James Blaine in 1884 was group and media derived. It was fashionable. Among the Mugwumps was Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt rejected the laissez-faire philosophy of the older Mugwumps and carried forward the view of morality as an elitist obligation. Progressives saw reform as a class-linked moral prerogative. However, Roosevelt also advocated support for big business, centralized authority and the use of rationality as he defined it, for the ends that he defined as moral. The Progressives applied moral skepticism with respect to the natural rights philosophy, but moral dogmatism with respect to their social vision. They were other-directed in that the Progressive vision consisted of ad hoc propositions, news and whim of the elite itself. It claimed to be pragmatic, but refused to permit its dogmas to be falsified. Roosevelt initated a century long claim to superior mental ability of those who advocate the Progressive or liberal dogma.
The claim of superior mental capacity of a superior class follow through Hamilton, Clay and the Mugwumps, into Progressivism and the New Deal. Hamilton and Clay believed with Jefferson that there was a natural aristocracy. Hamilton and Clay both believed that government support for the elite would foster social goals because the elite could best use public wealth. The Mugwumps transformed the claim to superior knowledge from business to control of business via the state. This coincided with the increasing complexity and knowledge required to succeed in business. As technology grew more complex, the centralizing elitist philosophy dispensed with the claim that superior knowledge was needed to found and run business, and transformed into the claim that it was needed to regulate and dominate business.
The Mugwumps were the first group to identify altruistic or moralistic elitist aims. This came about because of their horror at the boss system and what they identified as pathologies of immigration and urbanization--slums and corruption. They sought to rationalize government.
Roosevelt was thus the product of the increasing wealth of American society. Unlike the early nineteenth century Federalists and Whigs, the Progressives made no pretense of humble origins but rather claimed an aristocratic elitism. Jane Addams was a social worker who aimed to altruistically help immigrant poor through a superior social position. Labor was viewed as ineluctably trapped in inferior class status. Class and group differences were viewed as inevitable, with the Progressive leadership expressing the altruism of the elite class. Government support for and rationalization of big business, the good trusts and the Federal Reserve Bank, the Workers' Compensation laws that limited employer liability in the name of altruistic concern for workers expressed the new elitism.
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