There is no such thing as learning loss. Our kids didn’t lose anything [during the pandemic]. It’s okay that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.
So says Cecily Myart-Cruz, president of the United Teachers Los Angeles union. A union representing 33,000 teachers and associated educational staff.
“Education is political”, says Ms Myart-Cruz, who boasts of her ability to act with near-impunity, and whose list of Intolerable Things includes cognitive testing, “structural racism”, border controls, policing, and the supposed “privilege” of parents who would like their children to actually learn things, including times tables. Our Mistress Of Higher Purpose struggles to comprehend why parents might object to their children’s education, even in basic skills, being supplanted by the nakedly self-serving and increasingly weird activism of the people paid to teach them those basic skills. Instead, she endorses claims that such objections must be driven by “white-supremacist thinking”.
David Thompson, “Activism Farms”, DavidThompson, 2021-08-31.
December 1, 2021
QotD: When mere teaching isn’t enough, indoctrination takes over
August 21, 2021
QotD: Why do government workers need unions?
So, umm, why does a worker for the state need a countervailing power to protect her from the state?
Sure, we can understand this if she’s working for the bastard capitalists. They merely want to maximise their profit and screw the workers while doing so – as we all know. But government is omniscient, omnipresent and omnibenevolent. It cannot be true that someone working for government is in need of protection from government. Because all those fine folks that make up government simply could not allow it to be that state workers don’t gain adequate wages.
Seriously, come on, this is the Progressive insistence. That getting government to do things saves us from the ravages we endure if the capitalists do them.
But now survey the actual American workplace. Unions in the private sector pretty much don’t exist any more. It is the government workforces that are unionised, making up the vast majority of union members in the country. From that pattern of union existence we have to conclude that government screws the workers rather more than the capitalists do. Otherwise why would people desire let alone need the protection of unions when working for government?
Tim Worstall, “The Public Union Proof That The Progressive State Doesn’t Work”, Expunct, 2021-05-11.
July 8, 2021
Fallen Flag — the Illinois Central Railroad
Illinois Central Herald from a 1937 Passenger timetable.
The IC (nicknamed the “Main Line of Mid-America”) was originally incorporated in 1836 to build a rail connection from Cairo to Galena with a branch to Chicago, but didn’t receive federal support until 1850 and the company was finally granted a charter in 1851. The IC was the first “land grant” railroad in the United States, and prominent Illinois politicians were deeply involved in the railroad (Senator Stephen Douglas and future President Abraham Lincoln). The line was completed in 1856 and the “branch” to Chicago rapidly became the busiest portion of the line. After the Civil War, the IC expanded out of Illinois into Iowa and then by acquisition and consolidation eventually reached Louisville, Kentucky and New Orleans, Louisiana with many branches and secondary lines throughout the eastern half of the Mississippi valley. In the 1880s, the IC also expanded north and west, reaching locations in Wisconsin, South Dakota, and Nebraska by the end of the century.
During the 1880s, the IC came under the control of E.H. Harriman and as a result were one of the railroads that were involved in the union actions that ran from 1911 until 1915. The IC and the other Harriman-controlled railways had existing contracts with the individual trade unions representing workers on each line, but the unions hoped to force the railways to recognize a “System Federation” of the separate unions that would negotiate as a single unit. The IC refused and hired strikebreakers to fill the positions vacated by striking union members — including many African-American men who would not normally have been allowed to work in those positions on southern railways. Sporadic violence in 1911 and 1912 resulted in the deaths of at least 12 men and 30 others were killed in a steam locomotive boiler explosion in San Antonio, Texas. It was generally seen as a failure by mid-1912, but the strike didn’t formally end until 1915. The unions tried again in 1922 in the Great Railroad Strike, which was an even larger attempt by the unions to operate as a single bargaining unit, and another ten people were killed during the conflict but it lasted only a couple of months and failed to achieve its aims.
Although the major portions of the system were in place by World War 1, there were some additional lines added through to the 1960s, merging or acquiring control of lines like the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley, the Gulf & Ship Island, the Chicago, St. Louis & New Orleans, the Alabama & Vicksburg, and the Vicksburg, Shreveport & Pacific. George Drury picks up the story in mid-century:
In the 1950s and early ’60s IC purchased several short lines: former interurban Waterloo, Cedar Falls & Northern (jointly with the Rock Island through a new subsidiary, Waterloo Railroad); Tremont & Gulf in Louisiana; Peabody Short Line, a coal-hauler at East St. Louis, Ill.; and Louisiana Midland.
In 1968 Illinois Central acquired the western third — Nashville to Hopkinsville, Ky. — of the Tennessee Central when that financially ailing line was split among IC, Louisville & Nashville, and Southern.
Illinois Central Gulf
Illinois Central and parallel Gulf, Mobile & Ohio merged on August 10, 1972, to create the Illinois Central Gulf Railroad, a wholly owned subsidiary of Illinois Central Industries. GM&O was a likely merger partner for Illinois Central, as it was a north-south railroad through much the same area as IC. As part of the merger, ICG took over three Mississippi lines: Bonhomie & Hattiesburg Southern; Columbus & Greenville; and Fernwood, Columbia & Gulf.
The north-south lines of ICG’s map resembled an hourglass. Driving across Mississippi or Illinois from east to west, you could encounter as many as eight ICG lines. The former IC system converged at Fulton, Ky., and the former GM&O main line was less than 10 miles west of Fulton at Cayce.
[…]
On Feb. 29, 1988, the railroad changed its name back to Illinois Central, having divested itself of nearly all the former GM&O routes it acquired in 1972, when it added “Gulf” to its name. At the end of 1988 the Whitman Corp. (formerly IC Industries) spun off the railroad, which then dropped “Gulf” from the name, and in August 1989 control of the railroad was gained by the Prospect Group, which formerly controlled spinoff MidSouth Rail.
IC managers eventually turned their eyes west, to the Chicago, Central & Pacific, which it had sold in 1985. It saw CC&P’s route as a source of grain traffic and perhaps a way to get some of the coal moving east from Wyoming. In June 1996 IC purchased the CC&P. The line remains active.
In February 1998 Canadian National Railway agreed to purchase the IC, creating a 19,000-mile railroad. CN absorbed IC in July 1999, and IC lost its own identity within the CN system.
The Illinois Central’s City of New Orleans at Kankakee, Illinois in August, 1964. The train is led by EMD E7 #4017.
Photo by Lawrence and David Barera via Wikimedia Commons.
April 5, 2021
The 1919 Red Scare – the craziest year in American history
The Cynical Historian
Published 19 May 2016Many people have heard of the first Red Scare, but we should look at the year of 1919 more thoroughly. It’s probably the craziest one in American history.
Ann Hagedorn, Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007). https://amzn.to/2NHIcaT
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wiki:
The First Red Scare was a period during the early 20th-century history of the United States marked by a widespread fear of Bolshevism and anarchism, due to real and imagined events; real events included those such as the Russian Revolution. At its height in 1919–1920, concerns over the effects of radical political agitation in American society and the alleged spread of communism and anarchism in the American labor movement fueled a general sense of paranoia.The Scare had its origins in the hyper-nationalism of World War I as well as the Russian Revolution. At the war’s end, following the October Revolution, American authorities saw the threat of Communist revolution in the actions of organized labor, including such disparate cases as the Seattle General Strike and the Boston Police Strike and then in the bombing campaign directed by anarchist groups at political and business leaders. Fueled by labor unrest and the anarchist bombings, and then spurred on by United States Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s attempt to suppress radical organizations, it was characterized by exaggerated rhetoric, illegal search and seizures, unwarranted arrests and detentions, and the deportation of several hundred suspected radicals and anarchists. In addition, the growing anti-immigration nativism movement among Americans viewed increasing immigration from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe as a threat to American political and social stability.
Bolshevism and the threat of a Communist-inspired revolution in the U.S. became the overriding explanation for challenges to the social order, even such largely unrelated events as incidents of interracial violence. Fear of radicalism was used to explain the suppression of freedom of expression in form of display of certain flags and banners. The First Red Scare effectively ended in mid-1920, after Attorney General Palmer forecast a massive radical uprising on May Day and the day passed without incident.
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Hashtags: #History #1919 #RedScare #SpanishFlu #Bolshevism #BlackSox #strikes #WoodrowWilson #LeagueOfNations #prohibition #suffrage
[Note: this was filmed in 2016 … I think 2020 has now taken the mantle of “craziest year”. Unless 2021 doubles down all the weirdness of 2020.]
March 30, 2021
QotD: Static societies and disruptive outsiders
Stable societies with unchanged boundaries, Olson observed, “tend to accumulate more collusions and organizations for collective action over time.” Instead of accepting rules that encourage overall growth, these collusive organizations — trade groups and labor unions were paradigmatic examples — fight to keep what they have, slowing down “a society’s capacity to adopt new technologies and to reallocate resources in response to changing conditions,” thus reducing economic efficiency. Decline follows.
Olson pointed to Japanese stagnation under the Tokugawa shogunate, when, “before Admiral Perry’s gunboats appeared in 1854, the Japanese were virtually closed off from the international economy.” Ruling Japanese society, he writes, “were any number of powerful za, or guilds, and the shogunate or the daimyo often strengthened them by selling them monopoly rights.” The guilds “fixed prices, restricted production and controlled entry in essentially the same way as cartelistic organization elsewhere.”
A second example: Great Britain, “the major nation with the longest immunity from dictatorship, invasion and revolution” and, consequently, Olson explained, suffering “this century a lower rate of growth than other large, developed democracies.” In Olson’s view, the weak performance resulted from limits on change established by a “powerful network of special-interest organizations,” which included labor unions, industrial groups, and aristocratic cliques. By the 1970s, after the conservative government of Edward Heath fell in a losing battle with striking miners, many deemed Britain ungovernable. Olson contrasted the British situation with that of postwar Germany and Japan, where the chaos and destruction of wartime defeat wiped away established industrial and retail groups, leaving the field open to newcomers like Soichiro Honda or the Albrecht family (creators of international supermarket giant Aldi), who could work economic magic.
The word “ungovernable” was also used to describe New York in the 1960s and 1970s, when Mike Quill’s transit union ran roughshod over Mayor John Lindsay’s attempts to control public-sector wage growth. New York was a long-established city with lots of political collusion. The old Tammany Hall could broker deals to keep Gotham going, but Lindsay’s successor, Abe Beame, proved too weak to resist any special interest that wanted more spending or government favors. New York’s spending kept rising even as public services worsened, until bankruptcy loomed and public power wound up in the hands of the unelected Municipal Assistance Corporation. Thankfully, New York reformed itself economically, at least to some extent, under Mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, as Britain did under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Sufficiently strong leaders can buck entrenched insiders.
Edward L. Glaeser, “How to Fix American Capitalism”, City Journal, 2020-12-13.
February 15, 2021
The current (and future) rash of newsroom purges
Some thoughts from The Line on why people like former New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil are being given the show trial treatment and why it’s not going to stop quickly:
The New York Times Building in New York City, 1 January, 2008.
Photo by Frieder Blickle via Wikimedia Commons.
The first issue, of course, is a steady weaponization of HR processes and unions. Vehicles intended to fix problems like unfair pay structures, workplace misconduct and lack of due process are being re-deployed as tools of ideological conformity — fuelled by healthy doses of personal dislike and professional resentment.
Make no mistake: there are bad people in journalism, as there are in any profession. Abusers should be rooted out, and there should always be clear processes in place to handle toxic personalities fairly, decisively and effectively. (“Fairly” isn’t a buzzword here — the accused must have rights, too.)
But there has also been a steady lowering of the bar as to what evils warrant an HR intervention. Every newsroom should be a safe place from abuse, harassment and violence — but not from ideas that are offensive. We recognize the entirely legitimate concerns of employees who are from marginalized groups about historic injustices, microaggressions and systemic power imbalances. But being in the world sometimes involves working with people who are simply insensitive assholes. Drawing the line between the merely difficult and the truly dysfunctional isn’t always easy.
Further, many of the complaints now being bandied about are strategic. They are being used to pummel terrified HR staffs and weak, ineffectual managers into compliance with ideological agendas. A staff at war with itself and ever-fearful of the axe is easier to silence and control. Owners have long understood this; it’s a grim irony that our peers have now decided to take up the hood and the blade.
These workplace revolts always boil down to an internal struggle for control. The very concept of where power rests is being challenged by those who think the traditional way of running newsrooms is as obsolete as a classifieds page. Uprisings are about who decides institutional values, and who gets to enforce those values. An entire class of leaders needs to wake up to the fact that they’re three campaigns deep into a battle for their own legitimacy. And they’re losing.
That brings us to the third issue: management. We’ve said this before, but managers need to show some spine. The most consistent theme in all these newsroom eruptions is management either lacking the confidence to assert its authority, or hesitating to do so just long enough to make things worse. Too many leaders have been selected for their affability rather than their toughness. We at The Line suspect this is no accident. Powerful editors, necessary for effective management of staff, are inconvenient for owners intent on slashing said newsrooms. The kind of people who’d be most effective at crushing the odd staff rebellion also annoy the suits. So instead, we get nice people — truly nice people — who know the right folks and subscribe to the right politics, and shy away from embarrassment, conflict, and loss of status. They’re marks.
February 2, 2021
The History of Hollywood
The Cynical Historian
Published 3 Sep 2020This episode is about the history of Hollywood, and it’s quite a long one. This is part 9 in a long running series about California history.
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references:
Bernard F. Dick, Engulfed: The Death of Paramount Pictures and the Birth of Corporate Hollywood (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001). https://amzn.to/3f2Yb0SHollywood’s America: United States History Through its Films, eds. Mintz, Steven and Randy Roberts (St. James, N.York: Brandywine Press, 1993). https://amzn.to/2tZIoJT
Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum Books, 1992). https://amzn.to/2KX0jI2
Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era, (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1985). https://amzn.to/2VPTbVX
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Wiki: By 1912, major motion-picture companies had set up production near or in Los Angeles. In the early 1900s, most motion picture patents were held by Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company in New Jersey, and filmmakers were often sued to stop their productions. To escape this, filmmakers began moving out west to Los Angeles, where attempts to enforce Edison’s patents were easier to evade. Also, the weather was ideal and there was quick access to various settings. Los Angeles became the capital of the film industry in the United States. The mountains, plains and low land prices made Hollywood a good place to establish film studios.
Director D. W. Griffith was the first to make a motion picture in Hollywood. His 17-minute short film In Old California (1910) was filmed for the Biograph Company. Although Hollywood banned movie theaters — of which it had none — before annexation that year, Los Angeles had no such restriction. The first film by a Hollywood studio, Nestor Motion Picture Company, was shot on October 26, 1911. The H. J. Whitley home was used as its set, and the unnamed movie was filmed in the middle of their groves at the corner of Whitley Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard.
The first studio in Hollywood, the Nestor Company, was established by the New Jersey–based Centaur Company in a roadhouse at 6121 Sunset Boulevard (the corner of Gower), in October 1911. Four major film companies – Paramount, Warner Bros., RKO, and Columbia – had studios in Hollywood, as did several minor companies and rental studios. In the 1920s, Hollywood was the fifth-largest industry in the nation. By the 1930s, Hollywood studios became fully vertically integrated, as production, distribution and exhibition was controlled by these companies, enabling Hollywood to produce 600 films per year.
Hollywood became known as Tinseltown and the “dream factory” because of the glittering image of the movie industry. Hollywood has since become a major center for film study in the United States.
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Hashtags: #history #Hollywood #California
December 30, 2020
This is why the word “unexpectedly” gets such a workout in media these days
David Warren on “unexpectedly” negative results from policies born of virtue-signalling “good intentions” by self-styled progressives:
The expression, “unintended consequences,” is a charitable dodge. It is what old-fashioned, polite, civic-minded people say about the fallout from progressive social policies. It implies that their authors have overlooked something, or made some innocent mistake. For unfortunately, the policies do the exact opposite of what was promised. Surely the “reformers” didn’t mean to force decent, reasonable people to do things that any decent, reasonable person would consider to be satanic. Yet somehow, that was the result.
By contrast, these reformers despise the tactics of the bourgeois. Rather than argue, they prefer to drown out their opponents with slogans. Rather than coherently reply, they characterize any asking questions as “fascist,” “misogynist,” “racist,” “hate criminals,” &c. Those who have exposed scandals are personally smeared, slandered, doxxed. This isn’t new. It is the way the Left has always “debated,” going back long before Lenin. Once they have the police working for them, opponents get the knock in the middle of the night.
There are, incidentally, two kinds of “reform,” corresponding to the two political persuasions. One happens without planning, and is an organic response to things no longer working properly. Try, in good faith, to make the old system work, and it will subtly change. The “problems” fix themselves, when they are allowed to. The other kind is “reform” according to a theory. A huge, mostly imaginary “problem” is created, so a “solution” may be imposed. Every tool must be applied, to get everyone onside for the task: fake news, fake science, fake history, and miscellaneous fakery. For as every godless person knows, “the end justifies the means.”
Luckier than most, raised in “liberal” environments, I was able to discern this from an early age. By chance I acquired many friends who were refugees from Communist (especially Soviet-occupied) countries. But it was not just that. Having been trained counter-culturally, by non-conformist “classically liberal” teachers, and also having learnt to read for myself, I was already fairly alert. The clincher for me was a native disposition, not only to think independently, but to resist being a putz. It was not in my nature to assume that the enemies of real liberalism (which requires honesty) had good intentions. Reason, and experiment, demonstrated that they had not.
For instance, I early realized that leftwing factions formed a Party of Privilege. Every policy they advanced favoured individuals with relatively more wealth and power, against individuals with less. Unions were a good example. They represented the better-paid. The labour laws they advocated were designed to exclude the young and the poor from labour-market competition. They secured the allegiance of thuggish union members through crassly self-interested schemes. They opposed legitimate rewards for labour; for skill and hard work. Instead they enforced universal mediocrity, and punished intelligent enterprise. Legitimate labour interests, once represented by cooperative and self-managing guilds, were replaced by the interests of (untalented) union organizers.
November 26, 2020
Deport All Anarchists! – The Palmer Raids | BETWEEN 2 WARS: ZEITGEIST! | E.05 – Harvest 1919
TimeGhost History
Published 25 Nov 2020The First World War has been over for a year, and the modern era plows ahead. But so does fear and paranoia. In America, the Red Scare goes into overdrive.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Image Research by: Daniel Weiss and Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek KamińskiColorizations:
Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…Sources:
Some images from the Library of CongressSome Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound, ODJB, Edward Elgar, Richard Strauss and Pietro Mascagni:
– “One More for the Road” – Golden Age Radio
– “Dawn Of Civilization” – Jo Wandrini
– “Deviation In Time” – Johannes Bornlof
– “Easy Target” – Rannar Sillard
– “Dark Beginning” – Johan Hynynen
– “Steps in Time” – Golden Age Radio
– “Tiger Rag” – ODJB
– “Cello Concerto” – Edward Elgar
– “Pomp and Circumstance” – Edward Elgar
– “Die Frau ohne Schatten: Act III” – Richard Strauss
– “Cavalleria Rusticana” – Pietro Mascagni
– “What Now” – Golden Age RadioArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
November 5, 2020
America on the Brink of Revolution? | BETWEEN 2 WARS: ZEITGEIST! | E.02 – Winter 1919
TimeGhost History
Published 4 Nov 2020There is revolution and fear of revolution throughout the world in the winter of 1919. But cultural and technological revolutions are also bringing hope to many. A new age of Jazz and Cinema is about to reach America and Europe.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Indy Neidell, Francis van Berkel, and Spartacus Olsson.
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell, Francis van Berkel, and Spartacus Olsson.
Archive Research: Daniel Weiss
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek KamińskiColorizations:
Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…
Mikołaj Uchman
Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/Sources:
From the Noun Project:
– Money by Gilberto
– lightbulb By Maxim KulikovSoundtracks from Epidemic Sound and ODJB:
– “One More for the Road” – Golden Age Radio
– “The Last Journey” – Line Neesgaard
– “Tiger_Rag” – ODJB
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “Please Hear Me Out” – Philip Ayers
– “Dark Shadow” – Etienne Roussel
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “I Won’t Give You Up” – Almost Here
– “The Charleston” – Macy’s Voice
– “Defeated” – Wendel SchererArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
TimeGhost History
2 days ago (edited)
As in life, this series will always be a curious balance of light and dark. In the winter of 1919, one Parisian might have tickets to see the Original Dixieland Jass Band while their neighbour lies destitute after the war, and a well-to do man in Glasgow might be at the cinema while tanks rolls into his city to quell industrial unrest.Troubled and fascinating times then and troubled fascinating times now here in 2020. All of us here at TimeGhost hope that all of you are healthy and staying safe. And hey, if you need some entertainment to pass the time, you can find plenty of Between 2 Wars episodes alongside WW2 In Real Time and BIO Specials!
September 15, 2020
QotD: Racism and the minimum wage
South Africans were not alone in their minimum wage conspiracy against blacks. After a bitter 1909 strike by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen in the U.S., an arbitration board decreed that blacks and whites were to be paid equal wages. Union members expressed their delight, saying, “If this course of action is followed by the company and the incentive for employing the Negro thus removed, the strike will not have been in vain.”
Our nation’s first minimum wage law, the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, had racist motivation. During its legislative debate, its congressional supporters made such statements as, “That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country.” During hearings, American Federation of Labor President William Green complained, “Colored labor is being sought to demoralize wage rates.”
Walter E. Williams, “Minimum Wage and Discrimination”, Creators Syndicate, 2017-02-08.
August 27, 2020
QotD: Racism and the minimum wage
In 1925, a minimum-wage law was passed in the Canadian province of British Columbia, with the intent and effect of pricing Japanese immigrants out of jobs in the lumbering industry.
A Harvard professor of that era referred approvingly to Australia’s minimum wage law as a means to “protect the white Australian’s standard of living from the invidious competition of the colored races, particularly of the Chinese” who were willing to work for less.
In South Africa during the era of apartheid, white labor unions urged that a minimum-wage law be applied to all races, to keep black workers from taking jobs away from white unionized workers by working for less than the union pay scale.
Some supporters of the first federal minimum-wage law in the United States — the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 — used exactly the same rationale, citing the fact that Southern construction companies, using non-union black workers, were able to come north and underbid construction companies using unionized white labor.
These supporters of minimum-wage laws understood long ago something that today’s supporters of such laws seem not to have bothered to think through. People whose wages are raised by law do not necessarily benefit, because they are often less likely to be hired at the imposed minimum-wage rate.
Thomas Sowell, “Why racists love the minimum wage laws”, New York Post, 2013-09-17.
July 18, 2020
QotD: Peace can also be the health of the state
The story Bruno Nardi told made me think of the book that explains how peace is also the health of the state, namely Mancur Olson’s public choice theory classic, The Rise and Decline of Nations. It is years since I read this, but the story that this book tells is of the slow accumulation and coagulation of politics, at the expense of mere business, as the institutions of a hitherto thriving nation gang up together to form “distributional coalitions” (that phrase I do definitely recall). The point being that if you get involved in a war, and especially if you lose a war, the way Germany and Japan lost WW2, that tends to break up such coalitions.
The last thing on the mind of a German trade unionist or businessman, in 1946, was lobbying the government for regulatory advantages or for subsidies for his particular little slice of the German economy. Such people at that time were more concerned to obtain certificates saying that they weren’t Nazis, a task made trickier by the fact that most of them were Nazis. Olson’s way of thinking makes the post-war (West) German and then Japanese economic miracles, and the relative sluggishness of the British economy at that time, a lot more understandable. Winning a war, as Olson points out, is not nearly so disruptive of those distributional coalitions, in fact it strengthens them, as Crozier’s earlier posting illustrates.
Brian Micklethwait, “The view from Brazil is that peace is also the health of the state”, Samizdata, 2018-04-13.
May 26, 2020
“No more pencils, no more books…”
In the latest edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb considers the demands from the British government to quickly re-open the schools over the concerns of the educational unions and administrations:
The latest turn in an increasingly dull coverage of the Coronavirus panic is a proposed reopening of the schools. The Government wants them open as soon as possible for at least some of their students. The teaching unions are bleating that no one should go back until their members can be sure of not catching anything. The headmasters are worried about compliance with the social distancing rules. As a conservative of sorts, I think I am supposed to side with the Government and the pro-Conservative journalists — denouncing the teachers as a pack of idlers where not cowards, and insisting that those factories of essential skills must be set back in full production before the summer holidays. Of course, my settled view as a libertarian is that the teaching unions deserve all the support I have never so far given them. The schools must remain closed until no one is in any danger of so much as an attack of hay fever. The schools have been largely closed since the end of March. The longer they stay largely closed, the better. Best of all if they never reopen — or never reopen as they have been since attendance was made compulsory at the end of the nineteenth century.
I quote John Stuart Mill on compulsory schooling:
A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.
(On Liberty, 1859, Chapter 5, “Applications.”)This has always been the case in some degree. The spread of state schooling in England after 1870, and particularly after it was made compulsory in 1880, and then extended in 1902, is probably inseparable from the nationalist hysteria that drove our participation in the Great War. It also may explain the perverse belief, general until the 1970s, in the unique goodness and honesty of our ruling class. This being said, reasonable patriotism is to be encouraged; and, compared with others, our ruling class was not until recently so bad. A further point is that compulsory state schooling used to be reasonably effective at giving the mass of people a basic education. By 1960, most people were literate and numerate. They could spell and write grammatical prose. They had some exposure to the English classics, and the means of exploring these to greater depth if they wished. They had some understanding of history and the sciences. You can tell much about the quality of a people by examining what is read and watched. Looking at the popular arts in England during much of the twentieth century explains why this passage in On Liberty was less often discussed than his arguments for freedom of speech. Mill was right in the abstract. He could be shown to be right in certain particulars. But the evils of compulsory state schooling were mostly potential.
All this, however, is in the past. Since about 1980, schooling of all kinds has been made into a concerted means of indoctrination. The cultural leftists have captured both the classrooms and the curriculum. I will not elaborate on this claim. Some will argue over terminology, some over the merits of the capture, but hardly anyone denies the broad fact. One of the main functions of modern schooling is to bring about and to protect a radical departure from the old intellectual culture of this country.
Much of this departure has been achieved by preaching in the classroom. But it is supplemented by a growing bureaucracy of surveillance. The teachers themselves are watched, and they can be punished for dissenting from the established discourse. There is, for example, the Government’s Prevent strategy, which applies to the whole state machinery. Its purpose is to identify and root out anyone defined as a “political extremist.” Anyone identified as such is effectively banned from working with children and young people, and probably in the state sector as a whole.
April 20, 2020
The four distinct phases of the Great Depression in the United States
An older post from Lawrence W. Reed at the Foundation for Economic Education outlines the low points of the Great Depression and debunks a few widely held myths about that cataclysmic economic era:
Phase 1, the Federal Reserve and the end of the Roaring 20’s:
One of the most thorough and meticulously documented accounts of the Fed’s inflationary actions prior to 1929 is America’s Great Depression by the late Murray Rothbard. Using a broad measure that includes currency, demand and time deposits, and other ingredients, Rothbard estimated that the Federal Reserve expanded the money supply by more than 60 percent from mid-1921 to mid-1929. The flood of easy money drove interest rates down, pushed the stock market to dizzy heights, and gave birth to the “Roaring Twenties.”
By early 1929, the Federal Reserve was taking the punch away from the party. It choked off the money supply, raised interest rates, and for the next three years presided over a money supply that shrank by 30 percent. This deflation following the inflation wrenched the economy from tremendous boom to colossal bust.
The “smart” money — the Bernard Baruchs and the Joseph Kennedys who watched things like money supply — saw that the party was coming to an end before most other Americans did. Baruch actually began selling stocks and buying bonds and gold as early as 1928; Kennedy did likewise, commenting, “only a fool holds out for the top dollar.”
Phase 2, Hoover’s interventions and the disaster of Smoot-Hawley:
Willis C. Hawley (left) and Reed Smoot in April 1929, shortly before the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act passed the House of Representatives.
Library of Congress photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Unemployment in 1930 averaged a mildly recessionary 8.9 percent, up from 3.2 percent in 1929. It shot up rapidly until peaking out at more than 25 percent in 1933. Until March 1933, these were the years of President Herbert Hoover — the man that anti-capitalists depict as a champion of noninterventionist, laissez-faire economics.
Did Hoover really subscribe to a “hands off the economy,” free-market philosophy? His opponent in the 1932 election, Franklin Roosevelt, didn’t think so. During the campaign, Roosevelt blasted Hoover for spending and taxing too much, boosting the national debt, choking off trade, and putting millions of people on the dole. He accused the president of “reckless and extravagant” spending, of thinking “that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible,” and of presiding over “the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history.” Roosevelt’s running mate, John Nance Garner, charged that Hoover was “leading the country down the path of socialism.” Contrary to the modern myth about Hoover, Roosevelt and Garner were absolutely right.
The crowning folly of the Hoover administration was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, passed in June 1930. It came on top of the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922, which had already put American agriculture in a tailspin during the preceding decade. The most protectionist legislation in U.S. history, Smoot-Hawley virtually closed the borders to foreign goods and ignited a vicious international trade war. Professor Barry Poulson notes that not only were 887 tariffs sharply increased, but the act broadened the list of dutiable commodities to 3,218 items as well.
Officials in the administration and in Congress believed that raising trade barriers would force Americans to buy more goods made at home, which would solve the nagging unemployment problem. They ignored an important principle of international commerce: trade is ultimately a two-way street; if foreigners cannot sell their goods here, then they cannot earn the dollars they need to buy here.
Phase 3, FDR and the New Deal:
Top left: The Tennessee Valley Authority, part of the New Deal, being signed into law in 1933.
Top right: FDR (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) was responsible for the New Deal.
Bottom: A public mural from one of the artists employed by the New Deal’s WPA program.
Wikimedia Commons.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the 1932 presidential election in a landslide, collecting 472 electoral votes to just 59 for the incumbent Herbert Hoover. The platform of the Democratic Party whose ticket Roosevelt headed declared, “We believe that a party platform is a covenant with the people to be faithfully kept by the party entrusted with power.” It called for a 25 percent reduction in federal spending, a balanced federal budget, a sound gold currency “to be preserved at all hazards,” the removal of government from areas that belonged more appropriately to private enterprise, and an end to the “extravagance” of Hoover’s farm programs. This is what candidate Roosevelt promised, but it bears no resemblance to what President Roosevelt actually delivered.
In the first year of the New Deal, Roosevelt proposed spending $10 billion while revenues were only $3 billion. Between 1933 and 1936, government expenditures rose by more than 83 percent. Federal debt skyrocketed by 73 percent.
[…] in 1935 the Works Progress Administration came along. It is known today as the very government program that gave rise to the new term, “boondoggle,” because it “produced” a lot more than the 77,000 bridges and 116,000 buildings to which its advocates loved to point as evidence of its efficacy. The stupefying roster of wasteful spending generated by these jobs programs represented a diversion of valuable resources to politically motivated and economically counterproductive purposes.
The American economy was soon relieved of the burden of some of the New Deal’s excesses when the Supreme Court outlawed the NRA in 1935 and the AAA in 1936, earning Roosevelt’s eternal wrath and derision. Recognizing much of what Roosevelt did as unconstitutional, the “nine old men” of the Court also threw out other, more minor acts and programs which hindered recovery.
Phase 4, the Wagner Act:
The stage was set for the 1937–38 collapse with the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 — better known as the Wagner Act and organized labor’s “Magna Carta.” […] Armed with these sweeping new powers, labor unions went on a militant organizing frenzy. Threats, boycotts, strikes, seizures of plants, and widespread violence pushed productivity down sharply and unemployment up dramatically. Membership in the nation’s labor unions soared; by 1941 there were two and a half times as many Americans in unions as in 1935.
[…]
Higgs draws a close connection between the level of private investment and the course of the American economy in the 1930s. The relentless assaults of the Roosevelt administration — in both word and deed — against business, property, and free enterprise guaranteed that the capital needed to jumpstart the economy was either taxed away or forced into hiding. When Roosevelt took America to war in 1941, he eased up on his antibusiness agenda, but a great deal of the nation’s capital was diverted into the war effort instead of into plant expansion or consumer goods. Not until both Roosevelt and the war were gone did investors feel confident enough to “set in motion the postwar investment boom that powered the economy’s return to sustained prosperity.”
