Extra Credits
Published on 28 Mar 2015Support us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
____________The time has come for Blunt to enact the final act of his scheme: taking on the 31 million pound British debt. When Parliament initially balks at transferring responsibility for that much money to Blunt’s insolvent South Sea Company, he bribes them with special deals on his own stock. Despite a legal clause that should have locked the stock price until the company began paying off the debt, Blunt keeps introducing new plans to inflate the stock price and pocket the money for himself. He does everything from selling stocks on layaway to loaning people money so they could buy more stocks from him, creating an artificial demand for South Sea Company stock that drives the company’s worth up to 300 million pounds: a staggering ten times the initial value of the already stunning debt it had assumed. His success, founded entirely on speculation with no actual revenue from trade, not only starves out other businesses across Britain but exceeds the total amount of money in the country’s entire economy. This bubble can not last.
November 27, 2018
England: South Sea Bubble – Buying Out Britain – Extra History – #3
November 18, 2018
The Toronto Circus Riot of 1855
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published on 26 Oct 2018In 1855 Toronto, a fireman and a clown walked into a brothel. What followed would change the course of one of the world’s great cities.
The episode is intended for educational purposes. All events are portrayed in historical context. No graphic depictions of violence are included.
The History Guy uses media that are in the public domain. As photographs of actual events are sometimes not available, photographs of similar objects and events are used for illustration.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheHistoryGuy
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.
October 2, 2018
QotD: Legal plunder
Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise involve … But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn’t belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish that law without delay — No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic.
Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, 1850.
September 26, 2018
QotD: Offensive and defensive use of the law
As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose — that it may violate property instead of protecting it — then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder.
Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, 1850.
September 10, 2018
QotD: Perversion of the law
The law perverted! The law — and, in its wake, all the collective forces of the nation — the law, I say, not only diverted from its proper direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary! The law become the tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its check! The law guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish! Truly, this is a serious fact, if it exists, and one to which I feel bound to call the attention of my fellow citizens.
Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, 1850.
September 3, 2018
Planes, Trains, and… Actually, just Trains
Knowing Better
Published on 18 Sep 2016The railroad has affected your life more than you may have realized. From starting the mail order business to creating some of America’s greatest landmarks, see how this simple transportation system shaped the country we live in today.
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Why Trains Suck in America – Wendover Productions – https://youtu.be/mbEfzuCLoAQ
Photo Credits –
American Waterways/Canals are edits of images I used to teach in 2011 – The originals were from Wikicommons and have long since been removed or updated. No Copyright Information can be found.
The Three Proposed Railroad Routes are edits of images I used to teach in 2013 – The originals were from Wikicommons and have long since been removed or updated. No Copyright Information can be found.
I don’t normally add comments about the daily 2:00am videos, but there are a couple of things in this video that I think needed to be addressed. First, he rather casually skips over the vast increase in American railway building even before the enabling legislation for the transcontinental lines, and misses a great opportunity to explain how important they were in determining the outcome of the American Civil War. Second, and rather more irritatingly, he blithely asserts the common myth about the “Big Oil” conspiracy to buy up and shut down municipal light rail (streetcars, interurban railways, and radials). The various streetcar systems had almost all been economically shaky since the Great Depression (many had to be taken over by the municipalities involved to keep them out of bankruptcy), and the huge increase in private car ownership after World War 2 was the coup de grâce that finished off most of the rest. During the same time, bus routes were encroaching on the streetcar’s territory and had the huge advantage of not being tied to rails (allowing relatively easy re-routing without huge construction costs).
August 27, 2018
QotD: The trouble with term limits
I used to be a big supporter of term limits, but I think the evidence at this point is that they actually empowered lobbyists and activist groups, both because politicians going back to the “real world” needed somewhere to work after they left office, and because the politicians were too naive to recognize when they were being taken for a ride by a special interest. The longer I stay in Washington, the more skeptical I am of any silver bullet …
Megan McArdle, commenting on Facebook, 2016-11-11.
August 22, 2018
QotD: Corruption
People do not oppose corruption in politics and government. They oppose only the corruption that does not steer loot and social domination to them. After all, the entire process of so-called democratic government is nothing but corruption writ large and backed by the threat of violent force.
Robert Higgs, “Political and Governmental Corruption Is a Feature, Not a Bug”, The Beacon, 2016-11-04.
July 19, 2018
Crony capitalists of the military-industrial complex
Matthew D. Mitchell comments on some of the problems with government contractors and their all-too-cosy relationship with the government officials who hand out the public’s funds:
… as economist Luigi Zingales explains in his book, A Capitalism for the People, governments contracting with private interests has its own set of risks:
The problem with many public-private partnerships is best captured by a comment that George Bernard Shaw once made to a beautiful ballerina. She had proposed that they have a child together so that the child could possess his brain and her beauty; Shaw replied that he feared the child would have her brain and his beauty. Similarly, public-private partnerships often wind up with the social goals of the private sector and the efficiency of the public one. In these partnerships, Republican and Democratic politicians and businesspeople frequently cooperate toward just one goal: their own profit.
When President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex,” he was concerned that certain firms selling to the government might obtain untoward privilege, twisting public resources to serve private ends. It is telling that one of those contractors, Lockheed Aircraft, would become the first company to be bailed out by Congress in 1971.
For many observers, the George W. Bush administration’s “no-bid” contracts to Halliburton and Blackwater appeared to exemplify the sort of deals that Eisenhower had warned of. It is true that federal regulations explicitly permit contracts without open bidding in certain circumstances, such as when only one firm is capable of providing a certain service or when there is an unusual or compelling emergency. In any case, a report issued by the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in 2011 estimated that contractor fraud and abuse during operations in Afghanistan and Iraq cost taxpayers an estimated $31 to $60 billion. This includes, but is not limited to:
requirements that were excessive when established and/or not adjusted in a timely fashion; poor performance by contractors that required costly rework; ill-conceived projects that did not fit the cultural, political, and economic mores of the society they were meant to serve; security and other costs that were not anticipated due to lack of proper planning; questionable and unsupported payments to contractors that take years to reconcile; ineffective government oversight; and losses through lack of competition.
Governments may also award contracts to perform a service that has more to do with serving a parochial interest than with providing a benefit to the paying public. For example, Congress may order the Pentagon to procure more tanks even though the Pentagon itself says the tanks aren’t needed. Paying General Dynamics hundreds of millions of dollars to produce unneeded tanks in order to protect jobs in particular congressional districts may be an abuse even if the underlying process by which the contract was awarded is legitimate.
June 30, 2018
Wealthy virtue-signalling hurts the poor
At Catellaxy Files, Rafe Champion discusses some of the points raised by Matt Ridley in his recent book:
Essentially, the poor pay for the virtue-signalling of the rich. Dr Matt Ridley opens chapter 14 of Climate Science: The Facts with some blunt claims.
Here is a simple fact about the world today. Climate change is doing more good than harm. Here is another fact. Climate change policy is doing more harm than good.
On top of that he points out that the poor are carrying the cost of today’s climate policy. That is something for the ALP [Australian Labour Party] and the social justice warriors to think about.
This should remind people of another great postwar example of destructive virtue-signalling – massive foreign aid to the developing nations aka the Third World. That did more harm than good for the people of the Third World, apart from the crony criminals in power. The great Lord Peter Bauer was onto that very smartly, starting in the 1940s and his findings have been consolidated lately, notably by William Easterly [in] The White Man’s Burden: Why the west’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good. There are exceptions to the rule such as hands-on medical care and private education.
Ridley mentions in passing some of the cases where apparently smart people have made very bad calls, starting with a prominent and wealthy leftwinger who he debated on TV. Faced with the charge that climate policy was hurting the poor he replied “But what about my grandchildren?”. As though the future wellbeing of the presumably affluent and privileged grandchildren of the talking head might be threatened by policies that help the poor who are with us at present. Ridley also cited a son of Charles Darwin who thought that eugenic breeding programs were essential to save civilization and Paul Ehrlich who in 1972 predicted that millions would die due to over-population (prompting the one-child policy in China).
June 29, 2018
Honduran refugees and the hellhole they’re fleeing
Justin Raimondo on the plight of Honduras, and how it got to be the hellhole it is:
Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador
Image via Google Maps.
As tens of thousands gather at our southern border, roiling US politics, the question arises: why are so many of the asylum-seekers and migrants crossing the border illegally from three Central American countries in particular: El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala?
To begin with, it’s no coincidence that these are the three “most invaded” countries south of the Rio Grande – that is, invaded by the United States and its proxies.
[…]
So what are these “refugees” fleeing? Is it so bad that parents are justified in paying smugglers to guide their underage children – traveling alone! – across the US-Mexican border?
Unlike the rest of the media, which has routinely ignored most of what goes on in Latin America since the end of the cold war, I’ve been covering the region regularly. […] As I wrote last year:
“Honduras has always been an American plaything, to be toyed with for the benefit of United Fruit (rebranded Chiquita) and the native landowning aristocracy, and disciplined when necessary: Washington sent in the Marines a total of seven times between 1903 and 1925. The Honduran peasants didn’t like their lands being confiscated by the government and turned over to foreign-owned producers, who were granted monopolistic franchises by corrupt public officials. Periodic rural revolts started spreading to the cities, despite harsh repression, and the country – ruled directly by the military since 1955 – returned to a civilian regime in 1981.”
That column was about the Hillary Clinton-endorsed coup against the democratically elected President, Manuel Zelaya. The popular conservative-turned-reformer had pushed through a number of measures designed to alleviate the peasantry’s hopeless poverty and shift power from the military to the presidency, which angered the Honduran elite. They were triggered, however, when Zelaya joined the ALBA alliance of Latin American countries allied with Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. While ALBA never really amounted to much, either economically or militarily, the symbolism of this move was too much for the Honduran military, which was trained in the US and generously subsidized by Washington. The generals soon had Zelaya on a plane out of the country – while still in his pajamas. Washington issued a perfunctory scolding, but Hillary’s State Department had approved the coup in advance. It’s always been done that way, and this time was no exception.
[…]
So is the Honduran hegira to the Rio Grande a direct result of US foreign policy: is it “blowback,” to utilize CIA parlance for the unpleasant consequences of US actions abroad? It would be easy to say this is yet another example of how our foreign policy of global intervention comes back to haunt us, because that is partially true. Yet the old familiar story of the Ugly Americans backing the even uglier Local Despot doesn’t quite fit the most current facts: there has been an amazing drop in US military aid to Honduras. In 2017 it was over $19 million. This year it’s a mere $750,000!
The history of Honduras before the rise of American hegemony has done more to shape the country than any other single factor: the vital question of land ownership is the central issue here and in the entire South. Feudalism was never really abolished, and the feudalist remnants that persist to this day in the region delayed economic and technological development and kept the vast majority in penury. US foreign policy helped to sustain the life of this systemic repression: it didn’t create it. Whatever the “root causes,” the blowback from all this history has created something very close to a failed state.
This is why tens of thousands are making the long trek to the US-Mexican border: the social and institutional basis of human civilization is breaking down, not only in Honduras but throughout Latin America. Yet this is neither new nor is it primarily attributable to the actions of the US. Yes, our “war on drugs” has created a criminal class that is rivaling the power of the local governments to keep order, but hard drugs are illegal everywhere, not just in North America.
June 6, 2018
April 18, 2018
QotD: The United Nations
It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice-cream and a quart of dog faeces and mix ’em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former. That’s the problem with the UN. If you make the free nations and the thug states members of the same club, the danger isn’t that they’ll meet each other half-way but that the free world winds up going three-quarters, seven-eighths of the way. Thus the Oil-for-Fraud scandal: in the end, Saddam Hussein had a much shrewder understanding of the way the UN works than Bush and Blair did.
And, of course, corrupt organisations rarely stop at just one kind. If you don’t want to bulk up your pension by skimming the Oil-for-Food programme, don’t worry, whatever your bag, the UN can find somewhere that suits — in West Africa, it’s Sex-for-Food, with aid workers demanding sexual services from locals as young as four; in Cambodia, it’s drug dealing; in Kenya, it’s the refugee extortion racket; in the Balkans, sex slaves.
Mark Steyn, “UN forces — just a bunch of thugs?”, Telegraph Online 2005-02-15
April 9, 2018
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire – Horror in Manhattan – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 7 Apr 2018A throwaway cigarette landed on a pile of cloth. 146 workers died from the resulting fire. But this tragedy motivated citizens and politicians to take a stand from workers’ rights, creating a far safer world that we still live in over a century later.
April 5, 2018
QotD: ESR’s “Iron Laws of Political Economics”
Mancur Olson, in his book The Logic Of Collective Action, highlighted the central problem of politics in a democracy. The benefits of political market-rigging can be concentrated to benefit particular special interest groups, while the costs (in higher taxes, slower economic growth, and many other second-order effects) are diffused through the entire population.
The result is a scramble in which individual interest groups perpetually seek to corner more and more rent from the system, while the incremental costs of this behavior rise slowly enough that it is difficult to sustain broad political opposition to the overall system of political privilege and rent-seeking.
When you add to Olson’s model the fact that the professional political class is itself a special interest group which collects concentrated benefits from encouraging rent-seeking behavior in others, it becomes clear why, as Olson pointed out, “good government” is a public good subject to exactly the same underproduction problems as other public goods. Furthermore, as democracies evolve, government activity that might produce “good government” tends to be crowded out by coalitions of rent-seekers and their tribunes.
This general model has consequences. Here are some of them:
There is no form of market failure, however egregious, which is not eventually made worse by the political interventions intended to fix it.
Political demand for income transfers, entitlements and subsidies always rises faster than the economy can generate increased wealth to supply them from.
Although some taxes genuinely begin by being levied for the benefit of the taxed, all taxes end up being levied for the benefit of the political class.
The equilibrium state of a regulatory agency is to have been captured by the entities it is supposed to regulate.
The probability that the actual effects of a political agency or program will bear any relationship to the intentions under which it was designed falls exponentially with the amount of time since it was founded.
The only important class distinction in any advanced democracy is between those who are net producers of tax revenues and those who are net consumers of them.
Corruption is not the exceptional condition of politics, it is the normal one.
Eric S. Raymond, “Some Iron Laws of Political Economics”, Armed and Dangerous, 2009-05-27.
