Just now Rachel Maddow’s show is featuring a clash between Maddow’s economically and historically illiterate assertion that FDR’s domestic programs ended the Great Depression and Mitch McConnell’s economically and historically illiterate assertion that World War II ended the Great Depression. Whee! Left-wing ignoramuses facing off against right-wing ignoramuses! Salvation through slaughtering piglets versus salvation through slaughtering people! Where’s that libertarian channel?
13 Responses to Why I Slam the Mute Button
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Banned! | No Treason -
February 10, 2009
[…] Roderick Long’s blog continues to give me much enjoyment. Just now Rachel Maddow’s show is featuring a clash between Maddow’s economically and historically illiterate assertion that FDR’s domestic programs ended the Great Depression and Mitch McConnell’s economically and historically illiterate assertion that World War II ended the Great Depression. Whee! Left-wing ignoramuses facing off against right-wing ignoramuses! Salvation through slaughtering piglets versus salvation through slaughtering people! Where’s that libertarian channel? […]
It’s not just the right that chalks up the end of the depression to the war anymore. I’ve heard some liberal Keynesians claim the same thing recently, though these tend to be economists rather than the lay commentariat- the reason is probably that they realize claims for the New Deal just won’t hold up.
WWII is the sine qua non of the statist center- which would not hold otherwise- it only makes sense to ascribe all good things to it. Note also approving references by Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich to the Marshall Plan and WWII era economic centralization as a model for environmental regulation to stave off global warming.
But where is the libertarian channel indeed?
Can’t forget the Civil War as well. WWII and the Civil War are sacrosanct, and the martyrs for our liberty, Lincoln and FDR, are secular gods.
The libertarian channel could be the Counterpunch channel too! Al Gore? Marshall Plan? Bleh.
I almost afraid to admit it, but I probably belong in the “WWII ‘solved’ the Depression” camp.
I start from the assumption that the Depression was, to a large extent, a near-terminal crisis resulting from state capitalism’s structural tendency toward over-accumulation and over-production. Had it not been for WWII, the economy might have stabilized at a long-term, suboptimal equilibrium of around 16% unemployment. And somebody might eventually have gotten something like a restored NIRA to enable oligopoly industry to operate profitably at 50% capacity with the help of price-fixing cartels to pass the cost of idle capacity on to consumers on a cost-plus basis. WWII, a subject I keep harping on, “solved” the problem of over-accumulation (or at least postponed it for a generation) by blowing up most of the industrial capital outside the U.S. I’m not saying its a *good* way of “solving” it, obviously, but it earned consensus capitalism a respite until the 1970s or so. Since then, neoliberalism has been seeking one expedient after another to deal with the resumed problem of overaccumulation.
As the left has been pointing out, IF WWII is the explanation, then massive government spending can end depressions. The right is too dumb to see the concession they’ve made. David Schuster did something similar on his MSNBC show to what Maddow did. He showed the McConnell clip then brought on Jonathan Alter to refute it, showing a chart with rising GDP and falling unemployment to 1936 (nothing after that, I wonder why). Why don’t they think it might be more interesting to have a debate rather than talking to themselves? MSNBC joins Fox in the useless category. There’s a better shot at CNN, believe it or not.
And as Robert Higgs has pointed out, since so much of the economy was taken out of the price system during WWII, most economic statistics (such as GDP) from that era are largely meaningless.
Why do you keep torturing yourself by watching this crap? I don’t watch any news channels anymore, I don’t listen to any news radio anymore (not even NPR), and I tend not to watch for any news online either. I’ve been very happy with the decision. I still happen to be up to date with the goings-on of the times though. When I tend to hear news these days it simply sounds like one hopped up emergency after another. Each one reported just to replace the one that came before it.
Save yourself the heart attack, tune out.
Not to mention that Rachel Maddow’s voice is just annoying– she brings back terrible memories of pep rallies and cheery, deaf pediatricians with very long needles.
How annoying her voice sounds to me is directly correlated with what she’s talking about. When she’s bashing the right people for the right reasons (as she sometimes is — and as she far more often was before Obama became Prez) I rather like her.
“…cheery, deaf pediatricians with very long needles.”
Sounds rough. And very specific.
Kevin, I read your article on “Monopoly Capital” and where you rely on the overaccumulation theory, which I must say presents a very convincing narrative, but then I’ve also found the Austrian business cycle theory convincing because of its explanatory power regarding booms and busts. This was not part of your “Austrian/Marxist synthesis”, and it seems to me that as a mutualist you subsricbe to the view that monopoly banks keep interest artificially high, not low. Is there anything about the Austrian business cycle you find valuable or reconcilable with capital overaccumulation?
One virtue of your theory is that it explains the role of Keynesian policy, and the problem of “aggregate demand”. (And of course the postwar years were dominated by Keynesian thought, so they must be suspect from an Austrian view. This was the beginning of a permanent war economy, the military-industrial complex, etc.) It seems to me that the essence of Keynes is that instead of the market and production existing to serve actual human needs and preferences (which is what “demand” represents after all), consumers should themselves be altered to fit a given ideal structure of production. It reminds me of what Chesterton said of George Bernard Shaw:
“If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby.”
This is why I slam the back button:
http://tinyurl.com/c9ddkh