On Common Myths About the Great Depression

I recently finished reading Meltdown, by Thomas Woods 2009). This is a book that I highly recommend if you are interested in understanding the current financial mess and how we got here. Not only is it clearly written, but it is a joy to read because of the author's sense of humor and the book's length of well under 200 pages. The subtitle describes nicely what it covers: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse.

One topic that helps Mr. Woods in telling the full story, but that isn't captured explicitly in that subtitle, is his chapter 5, "Great Myths About the Great Depression". In this chapter Woods begins by giving some history that led up to the Great Depression, and he notes the following as myths:

• Herbert Hoover was a pro-capitalist, laissez-faire guy. This is what is commonly taught to us in school, but it couldn't be more wrong. The difference between Hoover and FDR is not at all the night-and-day that it is commonly protray as.
• FDR's New Deal was a bold new direction. Not really, it was more a series of extrapolations from what Hoover had already been doing, e.g., he expanded Hoover's public works initiatives, raised taxes furhter, and took Hoover's efforts to prop up wages and prices and institutionalized them, for instance by destroying crops and imposing acreage reduction requirements on farmers.
• If only FDR had done even more government spending, we'd have gotten out of the depression sooner. As Woods writes, the claim is that "if still more resources could have been seized from the private economy and spent on arbitrary projects, prosperity would have been restored." Along the way Woods debunks specific claims about the 1937-38 "depression within the depression".
• "What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II." (That is a direct quote from Paul Krugman.) Woods demolishes this myth, see pages 103-106.

I'll also note a good article from the WSJ on Nov. 4, 2008, titled "Five Myths About the Great Depression", by Andrew Wilson. The one's Wilson talks about are:

• Herbert Hoover, elected president in 1928, was a doctrinaire, laissez-faire, look-the-other way Republican who clung to the idea that markets were basically self-correcting.
• The stock market crash in October 1929 precipitated the Great Depression.
• Where the market had failed, the government stepped in to protect ordinary people.
• Greed caused the stock market to overshoot and then crash.
• Enlightened government pulled the nation out of the worst downturn in its history and came to the rescue of capitalism through rigorous regulation and government oversight.

Read this article for the details on each point. But more importantly, get Meltdown and learn what the biggest culprits were for the current financial mess, why what the Bush and Obama administrations (and their Congresses) are doing will not help, and what should be done instead to really help and keep major recessions like this from ever happening again.

A World War II Education for Jon Stewart

In response to some remarks Jon Stewart made recently, PajamasTV provides this video: Jon Stewart, War Criminals & The True Story of the Atomic Bombs.

Wow. Very powerful.

Medieval Church "Is Sex OK?" Chart

This is great stuff... check out this chart (click the image to see full chart) that answers the question "Is it ok to have sex now?" for those sad folks who lived in Christian Europe in the Medieval period. The chart is funny... but also... if ever there was a visual representation of the evil of such views on sex, this is it.

RIP: JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories

The Q&A piece in the June 11 issue of US News and World Report is titled "The Final Verdict" and is a brief interview with Vincent Bugliosi, author of a new and massive book about the Kennedy assassination titled Reclaiming History. This interview summarizes his views on the matter, and really does seem convincing. Assuming the 1,696 pages of his book fully backup his views, it seems there can really be no question here. Not that this will silence all the conspiracy theorists (since likely nothing will!).

Jamestown and Individualism

A few weeks ago Eric Daniels wrote a nice op-ed celebrating Jamestown, titled "Jamestown: Birth of America's Distinctive, Secular Ideal." A good read... including:

Though the Virginia Company found little gold and no sea route to Asia, they soon discovered something vastly more important--that economic opportunity lay wherever men were left free to work and create new wealth. In contrast to the rigid class structure and static economy of Jacobean England, America promised rewards based on individual merit. It was this spirit, and not the Puritan belief in cosmic predestination and unthinking duty to God, that attracted men to pursue their own earthly success in the New World.

"Here every man may be master and owner of his own labor and land," Smith noted in one of his many promotional books intended to attract new
settlers to America. "If he have nothing but his hands," he boasted, "he may set up his trade, and by industry quickly grow rich." For Smith and the other early settlers of Jamestown, the profound significance of America lay in the possibility that a man could choose, pursue, and realize his own destiny--it lay in a new ideal of individual liberty.

Images of America from Arcadia Publishing

I wanted to give readers a brief recommendation of a paperback book series from Arcadia Publishing, which describes itself as "the leading local history publisher in the United States, with a catalog of more than 4,000 titles in print and hundreds of new titles released every year." The series is titled "Images of America". Follow the link for it from the homepage, or visit this page, and scroll down to the intereactive map to find books in the areas that interest you. There are thousands of titles, many focused on specific cities, towns, or regions of the USA -- or even just a city in a particular era.

I was introduced to the "Images of America" series because my uncle, George Stone, co-authored the book on Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia, and he sent me a copy a few years ago. Since then I've also gotten a copy of the "Perinton, Fairport, and the Erie Canal", since we live in Perinton (there is also a separate one "Perinton and Fairport in the 20th Century", which I hope to get a copy of sometime soon). These books are about 120 pages or so, and are composed of historical photographs with descriptive captions for each. They are interesting reading, and certainly serve well as coffee-table books. And with so many already published, you are just about guaranteed to find one or two that will be of interest to you: just search for the town/city where you live now, or the ones where you grew up, or any others of interest. And check for multiple titles in your geographic area -- for instance, the city of Rochester, NY, with a population of just over 200,000, has 12 separate titles in this series -- plus over a dozen more for surrounding suburbs like Fairport. That is a lot of historical coverage for just one metropolitan area!

I'll add that there are also over 100 in the similar "Campus History" series, though none yet it seems for my alma-mater, The University of Rochester. The Sports in America series also looks interesting, and it boasts nearly 100 titles at present. Other series include Then and Now, Black America, and Postcard History.

All of these books generally have a cover price of $19.99 - $24.99, so visit their site or Amazon, or visit your local B&N or Borders and go to the local books section to browse around (I assume they'd carry these).

Hammer and Tickle: Jokes under Communism

I was browsing around the Moving Picture Institute's website today. This is the organization that supports the production of movies and documentaries that have a pro-liberty theme. I noted one of their productions in this earlier blog post, namely the very provocative movie Mine Your Own Business.

But the main reason for this posting is that I followed a link from MPI's site and found this very well-written item from May 2006 in Prospect magazine, Hammer and Tickle. Here Ben Lewis tells the story of jokes under Communist rule in the Soviety Union and elsewhere. Read the article to not only laugh at the many example jokes he gives, but to also be amazed again at just how ridiculous and terrible communism and socialism are. I mean... people in the thousands put in jail for telling jokes? Hundreds of thousands? I could quote many very nice passages from this article, but I prefer to just recommend that you read the entire thing.

Remembering Stalin's Mass Murders

Mara D. Bellaby's brief AP article was picked up in my local Rochester paper. She describes a recent gathering in Kiev, Ukraine to mourn the 10 million Ukrainians "killed by a famine orchestrated by Soviet leader Josef Stalin" in 1932-33. As she describes it: "Stalin provoked the famine to coerce peasants into giving up their private farms and joining agriculture collectives being formed across the Soviet Union. Villages were ordered to provide the state with set amounts of grain, but the demands typically exceeded crop yields. As village after village failed to meet their quotas, officials seized all food and residents were barred from leaving -- condemning them to starve. Farmers in Ukraine, which was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, fiercely resisted and bore the brunt of the human-caused disaster."

It is bad enough when, centuries ago, bad weather caused famine and starvation. Or today, in poor countries, when bad weather in conjunction with poor government policies, corruption, and/or cultural/societal mistakes lead to famine and starvation. But when it is entirely orchestrated as it was by Stalin and his regime... the evil of that is barely fathomable.

There is debate in the Ukraine about whether to call this horrible part of their history "genocide" or not. Some there are siding with Russian leaders who don't want to "politicize" it, saying that it should instead be termed "a tragedy". But calling it merely a "tragedy" would -- I think intentionally by some -- obscure moral responsibility (by Stalin and those in his regime) for what occurred.

One dictionary definition of tragedy -- "a lamentable, dreadful, or fatal event or affair, a disaster" -- is certainly accurate, but doesn't imply anything about whether it is a natural disaster (and hence not open to moral evaluation) or a man-made disaster (and hence open to moral evaluation).

Another definition of tragedy identifies the ancient Greek genre of play: "a dramatic composition, often in verse, dealing with a serious or somber theme, typically that of a great person destined through a flaw of character or conflict with some overpowering force, as fate or society, to downfall or destruction." So again, this sense of the word (while obviously used metaphorically in this case, since the slaughter was all to real and not merely a play) would obscure moral responsiblility because it leaves open that Stalin simply had a character flaw, or that the 10 million Ukranian dead was just fate, or caused by a complex societal conflict, and not something that can be blamed on the choices of Stalin and those in his regime.

That said, I'm not sure that "genocide" really applies either. The article notes that Stalin didn't specifically target Ukranians, and that numerous Russians and Kazakhs were also affected.

But the description that clearly does apply is "murder", in fact, "mass murder".

I'll note further that I don't see what is gained by classifying a mass murder as genocide or not. This is often politically motivated, and it usually seems to at least implicitly give merit to some form of collectivism -- as though membership in a group of some kind or other (race, religion, ethnicity, etc.), and being targeted because of that group membership, is somehow worse than simply being killed as individuals. In reality of course, only individuals exist and all forms of collectivism and collectivist thinking are, in the end, damaging and often deadly. Regardless of the intentions of the muderer, the act of murder is the murder of an individual person -- not the murder of a unit of some sort of collective entity. Individuals are alive and have the right to live, collective entities of this sort don't "live" and have no rights as such in this context.

So I say, lets just call it what it was -- what its essence was -- mass murder of individuals by evil people who had evil ideas.

And finally, while reading this article I couldn't help but think of the various people in the US in the 20th century, who argued (including while the mass murder was occuring) that communism, including the Soviet Union in particular, was the morally superior system to capitalism. From Hollywood to Academia to Politicians, that sentiment was widespread and argued for time and again. How horrible!

The Middle East: 5,000 Years in just 90 Seconds

And another thanks to Diana for linking to this awesome animation showing the various empires and such that have ruled the Middle East over the past 5,000 years.

Bernard Lewis on Freedom and Justice in Islam

Princeton's Bernard Lewis, who is arguably the most influential scholar on Mid-East Studies and Islam, has written "Freedom and Justice in Islam" (adapted from a lecture he delivered on July 16, 2006). I recommend this article for historical background you might not have gotten elsewhere.

A Very Brief History Lesson

Back in April Peter Cresswell blogged very succinctly (brief bullet points) on 14 lessons of history, ones often ignored or evaded. An interesting list (thanks to Stephen Hicks for the link).