Posted on 04/18/2009 11:15:16 PM PDT by Squidpup
Seventy five years ago is going to seem like yesterday here in just a second.
Take a look at this cartoon published in the Chicago Tribune on April 21, 1934 titled, “PLANNED ECONOMY OR PLANNED DESTRUCTION?”
It’s true for most that their sense of history usually extends into the past only about as far as the day they decided to start paying attention to what was going on around them.
An old saying goes something like this: “History, it is said, repeats itself. Few but are reminded almost every day of something that has gone before.”
Every “crisis” seems brand new, any manner of “suffering” in today’s world could never have been imagined nor experienced by mankind in the past…so people think as they muddle through their day.
If you are correct, we're headed for another World War to fix what the chosen one is doing.
Looks like the odds are about 60:40
Amazing, huh? Everything old is new again.
Thanks for the ping Lucy.
Not just our economy. They are hellbent on destroying the Constitution and every last vestige of our FREEDOM.
Worthwhile reading at that link, thanks.
“Tugwell, head brain truster” was a central economic planner in the Roosevelt admin.
“Rex the Red” Tugwell
http://www.novelguide.com/a/discover/egd_02/egd_02_00519.html
Richburg – author of the NRA – National Recovery Act, later found unconstitutional
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Richberg
Here is something on Wallace (who later became one of Roosevelt’s vice presidents)
http://www.conservapedia.com/Henry_A._Wallace
Harold Ickes – Secretary of the Interior and director of the Public Works Administration.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USARickes.htm
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WHIHAR.html
Most of these people are associated with Chicago in one way or another.
“The Soviet Union half-dominated world politics for 45 years. Former satellites, especially China, are still kicking. Can’t take that away from them.”
True, but neither can one “take away” the 100-million plus people who died under Communist regimes in the twentieth century, most of them subjects of the Soviet Union, the PRC, Cuba, Cambodia, North Vietnam, North Korea and other such regimes. I for one find it difficult to respect the power of any nation whose achievements - no matter how impressive - are built upon the corpses of countless, nameless victims.
As a conservative trapped in the heart of Indian Country - aka Obama’s Illinois, near Chicago - I cannot help but notice that the Chicago Tribune published this editorial cartoon! How things have changed; that paper was little more than an in-print cheerleading squad for Obama during the election.
Anyone else notice the figure of “Uncle Joe” Stalin hovering in the background? Seeing that, it is hard not to recall that recently, we Americans experienced something I never could have imagined as a boy or a younger man, namely Pravada - the former Soviet news agency - lecturing the USA on the dangers of socialism! Talk abut irony!
“I for one find it difficult to respect the power of any nation whose achievements - no matter how impressive - are built upon the corpses of countless, nameless victims.”
Whether or not it deserves your moral sanction, communist power deserves respect qua power. For power is force, and if not measured in actual violence, then in latent ability to commit violence.
Why capitalism fails:
It’s not just the current administration’s penchant for massive spending, our government has a flawed economic
system that will fail as it already has.
Since the global financial system started unraveling in dramatic fashion two years ago, distinguished economists have suffered a crisis of their own. Ivy League professors who had trumpeted the dawn of a new era of stability have scrambled to explain how, exactly, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression had ambushed their entire profession.
Amid the hand-wringing and the self-flagellation, a few more cerebral commentators started to speak about the arrival of a “Minsky moment,” and a growing number of insiders began to warn of a coming “Minsky meltdown.”
“Minsky” was shorthand for Hyman Minsky, a hitherto obscure macroeconomist who died over a decade ago. Many economists had never heard of him when the crisis struck, and he remains a shadowy figure in the profession. But lately he has begun emerging as perhaps the most prescient big-picture thinker about what, exactly, we are going through. A contrarian amid the conformity of postwar America, an expert in the then-unfashionable subfields of finance and crisis, Minsky was one economist who saw what was coming. He predicted, decades ago, almost exactly the kind of meltdown that recently hammered the global economy.
In recent months Minsky’s star has only risen. Nobel Prize-winning economists talk about incorporating his insights, and copies of his books are back in print and selling well. He’s gone from being a nearly forgotten figure to a key player in the debate over how to fix the financial system.
But if Minsky was as right as he seems to have been, the news is not exactly encouraging. He believed in capitalism, but also believed it had almost a genetic weakness. Modern finance, he
argued, was far from the stabilizing force that mainstream economics portrayed: rather, it was a system that created the illusion of stability while simultaneously creating the conditions for an inevitable and dramatic collapse.
In other words, the one person who foresaw the crisis also believed that our whole financial system contains the seeds of its own destruction. “Instability,” he wrote, “is an inherent and inescapable flaw of capitalism.”
Minsky’s vision might have been dark, but he was not a fatalist; he believed it was possible to craft policies that could blunt the collateral damage caused by financial crises. But with a growing number of economists eager to declare the recession over, and the crisis itself apparently behind us, these policies may prove as discomforting as the theories that prompted them in the first place. Indeed, as economists re-embrace Minsky’s prophetic insights, it is far from clear that they’re ready to reckon with the full implications of what he saw.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/13/why_capitalism_fails/
There is nothing wrong with capitalism. Only with societal / political attempts to control it.
Occasional failures are good for long-term market discipline.
The notion of too-big-to-fail comes NOT from free market capitalist thinking and should be considered too-stupid-to-live!
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