Tucker closes this compendium with a number of reviews of books and movies. The depth of his comprehension is sometimes astounding; he can remember more from watching a movie once than many can from watching it ten times, and his book summaries are so excellent that he might want to watch out for the IP police.
It is incredibly complicated to estimate the total "social cost" of a government policy. Ultimately, this difficulty stems from the fact that costs really only make sense in terms of an individual's subjective preferences. In that respect, costs cannot be aggregated.
The trouble with nullification is not that it is too "extreme," as the enforcers of opinion would say, but that it is too timid. But it gets people thinking in terms of resistance, which has to be a good thing, and it defies the unexamined premise of the entire political spectrum.
John T. Flynn was, if not the very first, then one of the very first few, of the revisionist journalists to write about the New Deal, focusing on both its domestic and its foreign policies. He is the beginning of historical revisionism where the New Deal is concerned.
One of Josiah Child's main deviations from free-market and laissez-faire doctrine was to agitate for one of the favorite programs of the mercantilists — to push the legal maximum rate of interest ever lower. Formerly discredited "usury laws" were making a comeback on faulty economic rather than natural-law or theological grounds.
Hundreds of fans of the Austrian School are joining the campaign, because they realize the wonderful corner into which Krugman would be painted. He will either have to debate Austrian business-cycle theory or explain why a New York City food bank would miss out on $100,000+ in "right-wing" money.
The question of questions for the politician should ever be "What type of social structure am I tending to produce?" But this is a question he never entertains, even though vast evidence exists that all legislation expands beyond its original intent.
We've only had 294 failures this cycle, but it is a big deal: adjusted to current dollars, the Depression banking crisis was $100 billion, the S&L crisis was $923 billion, and the current crisis is nearly $8 trillion.
Because the state is grounded in a network of lies, contradictions, deceptions, and conflicts, political systems are inherently in conflict with reality and must resort to intentional distortions of truth as a way of trying to appear coherent to a gullible public.
The more historians and publicists worshiped and adored the greatness and the majesty of Franklin Roosevelt, the more they scorned his predecessor as the dour man in the high collar who tried but failed to thwart the nation's ascension to paradise.
