{"id":31650,"date":"2015-06-15T03:00:10","date_gmt":"2015-06-15T07:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31650"},"modified":"2015-06-13T09:55:24","modified_gmt":"2015-06-13T13:55:24","slug":"the-kitchen-debates-of-1959","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/06\/15\/the-kitchen-debates-of-1959\/","title":{"rendered":"The “Kitchen Debates” of 1959"},"content":{"rendered":"

B.K. Marcus<\/a> explains how ice cream was the secret weapon that won the Cold War:<\/p>\n

Richard Nixon stood by a lemon-yellow refrigerator in Moscow and bragged to the Soviet leader: \u201cThe American system,\u201d he told Nikita Khrushchev over frosted cupcakes and chocolate layer cake, \u201cis designed to take advantage of new inventions.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was the opening day of the American National Exhibition at Sokol\u2019niki Park, and Nixon was representing not just the US government but also the latest products from General Mills, Whirlpool, and General Electric. Assisting him in what would come to be known as the \u201cKitchen Debates\u201d were attractive American spokesmodels who demonstrated for the Russian crowd the best that capitalism in 1959 had to offer.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t you have a machine,\u201d he asked Nixon, \u201cthat puts food in the mouth and presses it down? Many things you\u2019ve shown us are interesting but they are not needed in life. They have no useful purpose. They are merely gadgets.\u201d<\/p>\n

Khrushchev was displaying the behavior Ludwig von Mises described in The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality<\/em>. \u201cThey castigate the luxury, the stupidity and the moral corruption of the exploiting classes,\u201d Mises wrote of the socialists. \u201cIn their eyes everything that is bad and ridiculous is bourgeois, and everything that is good and sublime is proletarian.\u201d<\/p>\n

On display that summer in Moscow was American consumer tech at its most bourgeois. The problem with \u201ccastigating the luxury,\u201d as Mises pointed out, is that all \u201cinnovation is first a luxury of only a few people, until by degrees it comes into the reach of the many.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is appropriate that the Kitchen Debate over luxury versus necessity took place among high-end American refrigerators. Refrigeration, as a luxury, is ancient. \u201cThere were ice harvests in China before the first millennium BC,\u201d writes Wilson. \u201cSnow was sold in Athens beginning in the fifth century BC. Aristocrats of the seventeenth century spooned desserts from ice bowls, drank wine chilled with snow, and even ate iced creams and water ices. Yet it was only in the nineteenth century in the United States that ice became an industrial commodity.\u201d Only with modern capitalism, in other words, does the luxury reach so rapidly beyond a tiny elite.<\/p>\n

\u201cCapitalism,\u201d Mises wrote in Economic Freedom and Interventionism<\/em>, \u201cis essentially mass production for the satisfaction of the wants of the masses.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

B.K. Marcus explains how ice cream was the secret weapon that won the Cold War: Richard Nixon stood by a lemon-yellow refrigerator in Moscow and bragged to the Soviet leader: \u201cThe American system,\u201d he told Nikita Khrushchev over frosted cupcakes and chocolate layer cake, \u201cis designed to take advantage of new inventions.\u201d It was the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,7,13],"tags":[108,174,515,433],"class_list":["post-31650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-history","category-usa","tag-coldwar","tag-innovation","tag-richardnixon","tag-sovietunion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8eu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31650"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31651,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31650\/revisions\/31651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}