12. War Collectivism in World War I
More than any other single period, World War I was the critical watershed for the American business system.* It was a “war collectivism,” a totally planned economy run largely by big-business interests through the instrumentality of the central government, which served as the model, the precedent, and the inspiration for state-corporate cap
Articles about the tax exploits of global corporations generally are short on facts and long on innuendo. This recent missive from the Associated Press about Apple is a standard example of the genre: full of breathless accounts (Bermuda! Loose rules! Shelters!) that imply sinister motives behind standard business practices.
Because of their physical size, large states are able to exercise more state-like power than geographically smaller states — and thus exercise a greater deal of control over residents. This is because larger states benefit from higher barriers to emigration than smaller states, thus allowing them to avoid one of the most significant barriers to expanding state power: the ability of residents to move away. Moreover, by virtue of the fact that the land area of the earth is more or less fixed, a small number of large states prevents the formation of a large number of small states.
11. Origins of the Welfare State in America
Standard theory views government as functional: a social need arises, and government, semi-automatically, springs up to fill that need. The analogy rests on the market economy: demand gives rise to supply (e.g., a demand for cream cheese will result in a supply of cream cheese on the market).
10. The Progressive Era and the Family
While the “Progressive Era” used to be narrowly designated as the period 1900–1914, historians now realize that the period is really much broader, stretching from the latter decades of the nineteenth century into the early 1920s. The broader period marks an era in which the entire American polity — from economics to urban planning to medicine to social work to the licensing of professions to the ideology of intellectuals — was transformed from a roughly laissez-faire system based on individual rights to one of state planning and control.
Here is an often-used tactic to defend government police organizations from criticism. Whenever critics point out abusive tactics of police officers, defenders counter with: “And yet you won’t refuse police help the next time there’s a robber in your house!” This, we are told, illustrates that all police critics are “hypocrites.”
It is hard to know where to begin regarding the charges against Paul Manafort, the former campaign director for Donald Trump’s successful presidential bid, but having read the indictments and knowing some background about both the case and the investigation, I cannot say it is exactly a high point of American justice.
Last Thursday, congressional Republicans unveiled their tax reform legislation. On the same day, President Trump nominated current Federal Reserve Board Governor Jerome Powell to succeed Janet Yellen as Federal Reserve chair. While the tax plan dominated the headlines, the Powell appointment will have much greater long-term impact. Federal Reserve policies affect every aspect of the economy, including whether the Republican tax plan will produce long-term economic growth.
The claim that the United States political system is “a republic, not a democracy” is often heard in libertarian and conservative circles, and is typically invoked whenever the term “democracy” is used in any favorable context. This claim is generally invoked when the user believes one of the following:
The widely understood libertarian environment has lately published a multitude of very eloquent articles about how to approach the global warming issue, what to think about “established science,” and whether or not to be “agnostic.” Those materials, however well written, fail to see the core of the scientific method — which is again understandable since their authors have been immersed in a different kind of science — that is, social science. The word “agnostic” does not fit in here, however.
