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America is not the nation it was in the 1930s. Earth is not the planet it was.
Brave New World, We, Things to Come, Looking Backward ... they all projected greater (greatest) collectivism. Understand BNW in particular. The clones had names like Lenina Marx and Benito Hoover. It was expected that as a trained engineer whose organizational skills saved Europe after World War One, that Herbert Hoover would manage the economic crisis.
Working on the Bay Bucks Community Currency Committee, I read many newspapers from Traverse City, Michigan, from the October 1929 to Winter 1932-1933 when the banks were closed. TC is not special in any way, a small, almost isolated community of farmers. There was a front page story, top of the fold, that showed Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini at their desks! Writing! "The great dictators of Europe work to solve their nations' problems."
I do not see that for our time.
Atlas Shrugged... The Fountainhead... Anthem....
As I have said here too often, I just completed a four-year university degree in a pretty mainstream place, Ann Arbor, not at the U of M, but at EMU. I had two required classes in undergraduate economics, Micro and Macro. I do not buy textbooks, I collect them. As a security guard on campus, I got to pick up the discards when faculty cleared out their offices. It is the mainstream of economics education in college today to teach Chicago Monetism. Keynes gets a sidebar -- as does Ludwig von Mises -- both of them highlighted extreme opinions with some merit.
What I see is that the millennial eschatology of christian conservatism so deeply permeates our thinking -- as if Atlas were not enough -- that we all not only expect the end of the world, we dream of it, like Sleeping Beauty waiting for her Prince.
I stopped doing that when I read The Future and Its Enemies by Reason editor Virginia Postrel. Not only is the world a pretty stable place, we should be happy that it is. Yes, we are always on guard here at the Marotta Household. We have been buying extra canned foods and other staples, a little bit each week. In centralized economies, suprising dislocations are unsurprisingly predictable. It's not the end of the world. It's just another US President coming... and going... in one term...
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