| parrthenon@cs.com 2005-08-24, 12:31 am |
| HISTORICAL ILLITERACY
<laissez faire economics and Christian charity... seem to recall we had
a lot more of both around 150 years ago. I seem to recall that racial
problems were much more severe then, too.> Taylor Kingston
More historical illiteracy from Taylor
Kingston. His 150 years ago puts us into the period
of Southern feudalism and slavery. Feudalism and
slavery are the near antithesis of laissez faire and
Christian charity.
I recommend that Mr. Kingston read Louis
Hartz's splendid and influential The Liberal Tradition
in America. He will thereby discover the difference
between the thinking of the Southern chivalry and its
philosophers and that of, say, a Carl Schurz or a
James J. Hill. The idea that, say, there is an
identity of thinking between an Andrew Carnegie and a
John C. Calhoun is often played upon by either
semi-literate or highly political liberals, though the
latter, at least, know that Marx himself would be
spinning in his grave at confounding feudalism with
capitalism.
One of the better accessible works of economic
history is Robert Higgs' The Economic Transformation
of the United States, 1865 - 1914, an analysis of the
growth in human well-being over a 50 year period when
government in the United States spent about one
percent of the GNP as opposed to nearly half of the
GDP at the current time.
Real wages rose at a compounded rate of about
eight percent over 50 years. The price index, if put
at 100 in 1865, was 40 on the eve of World War I.
America went from what would today be regarded as a
rather poor Third World country to a majority middle
class society. Since the late 1960s, real wages have
been stagnant in the United States.
The opportunity cost being exacted from
Americans today, who are increasingly like serfs in
feudal times, is immense. They know it not, since the
entire concept of opportunity cost in economics is
foreign to them. The basic idea stateside is to have
a market-based economy which keeps people working hard
(the problem with socialism, the liberal left has
decided, is that it consumes more wealth than it
creates, eventually destroying the state apparatus
when the economy collapses) and then tax away
significant percentages which keeps a politically
significant percentage of people dependent on the
state and even grateful for receiving back in payment
a small percentage of the taxes paid
The race problem in America is one of margins.
If one returns to private hands the $2.5 trillion in
resources claimed annually by the American central
regime for war and waste, the investment boom would
suck up the margins like a vacuum-cleaner of human
prosperity.
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