For a while the postwar ideological climate seemed to be the same as during the war: internationalism, statism, adulation of economic planning and the centralized state, were rampant everywhere. During the first postwar year, 1945–46, I entered Columbia Graduate School, where the intellectual atmosphere was, oppressively, just more of the same.
In testimony before the House Committee on Financial Services, Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect, delivered a searing Philippic on the topic of the current excesses.
Like many from his part of the political spectrum, however, he missed the essential cause of the disease and so recommended the wrong treatment, as the following open letter to him tries to explain:-Mr. Kuttner,
Richard Lindzen is one of the heroic challengers to the scientific establishment on the topic of global warming, yet you don’t often hear about him. He is an an atmospheric physicist and the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When I picked up my October issue of Outside magazine, I was delighted to see the interview with him. Fortunately, the article is now online here.
Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.
[This article is chapter 6 of The Betrayal of the American Right.]
How To Learn Economics
If you want to understand how an economy works, forget your mathematical models and your econometric textbooks. People who learn economics that way often can’t explain how an economy actually works. If you want to learn economics try this. Master the fundamentals of the logic of choice and the theory of money — then go to war and be charged with coming up with fixes for all of the disastrous economic policies the war state has invented to sustain itself and impoverish the people.
Senator Norm Coleman, quoted in the NYTimes: “Government is about first-class service. It is certainly not about first-class lifestyles.”
Podhoretz has blundered badly. He confuses the arrangements made in the Peace of Augsburg (1555) with the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which confirmed the principle of cuius regio and extended it to Calvinism. But what is a mere century to our learned author? But I am holding Podhoretz to an unfair standard. As he makes abundantly clear in this book, his field is not historical fact but rather fantasy and propaganda. 