Thomas Brewton

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Misguided Christians and Liberals

May 23, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Some individual Christians, within Evangelicalism and within Catholicism, believe that society should be channeled into “correct” behavioral patterns by political edict.

Pope Benedict confronted this materialistic doctrine in his recent journey to Brazil. Variously known as liberation theology or the social gospel, the belief that the political state has the capacity, as well as the duty, to compel its citizens to follow certain ways of thinking and behavior, is not Christianity, but socialism.

Father Robert A. Sirico deals with the Pope’s endeavor in his May 18th article in the Wall Street Journal titled Liberating Christianity.

The Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 2:4-5, My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.
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Imus and Virginia Tech

April 30, 2007 by 1 Comment

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The inconsistency of atheistic materialism. There’s more there than Marx allowed for.

Our thoroughly secularized society explains events and behavior, human nature itself, as the product of the material conditions of living and earning a living, in accord with the Marxian thesis.

In The German Ideology Marx and his colleague Friederick Engels wrote:

As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.

Present-day liberals therefore deny the concept of a higher law, of timeless moral truths emanating from God the Creator of the universe. They fancy themselves capable of restructuring society, and human nature in the process. Hence the endless stream of new Federal welfare-state programs. In the liberal view, economic and social problems can be cured only by bountiful application of the most materialistic of all things: money.
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Krugman and Friedman – Part Three

April 29, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Krugman is tarred with his own brush.

Earlier postings on this topic were Part One and Part Two.

In Paul Krugman’s New York Review of Books article (Who Was Milton Friedman?), he wrote:

But there’s an important difference between the rigor of [Milton Friedman’s] work as a professional economist and the looser, sometimes questionable logic of his pronouncements as a public intellectual…. And is must be said that there were some serious questions about his intellectual honesty when he was speaking to the mass public.

That assessment applies with equal, if not greater, force to Mr. Krugman himself.
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Success in God’s Eyes

April 26, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Real success is following God’s will, not making lots of money.

Sunday’s sermon at the Long Ridge Congregational Church (non-UCC) in North Stamford, Connecticut, was delivered by Rev. Steve Treash. His message dealt with success in the things that really matter.

While confidence is, by some measures, thought to be the best predictor of academic and business success, it too easily becomes exclusively self-confidence. As with Peter’s wanting to walk across the water to meet Jesus, that sort of confidence falters the moment we take our eyes off Jesus as our savior. We begin to sink and can be saved only by calling for the Lord’s help.

True success in this life is doing God’s will to the best of our abilities.
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Suicide Bombers and Abortion

April 24, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Training Islamic children to become suicide bombers has much in common with abortion.

For an excellent analysis of the Supreme Court’s recent Carhart decision on partial-birth abortion, see The Supreme Court and Reasonable Hope by Richard John Neuhaus on the First Things website.

Reactions to Carhart raise the question whether our hedonistic, pro-choice liberals have any better claim to rectitude than Islamic jihadists.

Even liberals who blame the United States for Islamic aggression profess distress at the horrific phenomenon of Islamic families proudly urging their children to blow themselves up in order to kill infidels.

Those same liberals strenuously uphold the “right” of any woman, without the slightest recourse to due process of law, to murder her unborn infant. No tears are shed for the innocent life butchered in the abortion process.
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Is Social Security a Form of Savings?

April 16, 2007 by 1 Comment

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Emphatically, NO.

A reader on the Intellectual Conservative website, responding to the recent post titled Savings?, posed this query:

Let me ask a silly question: Do your Social Security contributions count as savings?

The answer is that Social Security is the polar opposite of savings.
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The Paradox of Reason

April 13, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Liberal rationality leads to chaos, thence to tyranny.

The foundation of liberal-Progressive-socialism, beginning with the pre-Revolutionary French Encyclopedists, has been belief in the supremacy of human reason as the sole guide to social order. In practice it turns out to be a foundation of sand, always washed away in the deluge of political tyranny.

Reason as the only source of wisdom was almost immediately stripped of such pretense and revealed as naked savagery in the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, instituted to compel conformity to the revolutionists’ political aims.
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Savings?

April 9, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

A potentially dangerous definition of savings is being pushed by some economists and investment advisors.

An increase in the market value of your home is not savings in either a practical sense or from the viewpoint of the economy as a whole. Nonetheless this idea appears repeatedly in the media.

An example from the April 16,2007, edition of Forbes magazine is money manager Ken Fisher’s “Portfolio Strategy” column:

American savers, end your guilt trip. You have been told, by economists and by official government statistics, that you are inadequate, that the U.S. savings rate is negative. Wrong! It’s a myth that Americans don’t save.

The official numbers have some big deficiencies. They don’t count capital gains….
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Palm Sunday Expectations

April 5, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

It’s not what we expect, but what God wants.

The Palm Sunday sermon at the Long Ridge Congregational Church (non-UCC) in North Stamford, Connecticut, was delivered by Rev. Kevin Butterfield. His text was John 12:12-15.

The next day the great crowd that had come for the Feast heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting,
“Hosanna!” [Save us]
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
“Blessed is the King of Israel!”

Jesus found a young donkey and sat upon it, as it is written, _”Do not be afraid, O Daughter of Zion; see, your king is coming, seated on a donkey’s colt.”

The feast of the Passover was a joyous occasion for the Israelites at any time. But for the great crowd following Jesus into Jerusalem and rushing out of the city to greet him, there was an almost delirious expectation that Jesus was about to become their earthly king who would deliver them from the rule and taxes of Rome.

The problem for those people was not the Romans, but themselves. They had drifted far from the real spirit of the Mosaic covenant between God and the people of Israel.
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Free-Trade Hypocrisy

April 3, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Is liberal self-contradiction deliberate, or the result of ignorance?

Liberal labor union supporters speak of promoting human welfare by opposing free trade. But the evidence shows that free trade has greatly improved the lot of citizens in countries exporting to the United States.

The problem within the United States is not loss of jobs in total, but the loss of jobs in heavily unionized, therefore over-paid sectors of the economy that were able to free-load on the rest of the nation before foreign competition became a reality.

Liberals have hooked the free-trade issue into opposition to globalization, the latter being only indirectly related to the former. Globalization – the dispersion of a corporation’s activities around the globe to optimize economic efficiency – is not a necessary implication of free trade. Globalization is rather a phenomenon of instantaneous satellite communications systems and the transition of human activity into a more heavily technological age.
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The Free-Trade Dilemma

April 2, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Free trade may no longer be the winner of the past, but liberal prescriptions will only make the problem worse.

The March 28, 2007, edition of the Wall Street Journal carries a front-page, feature article titled Pain From Free Trade Spurs Second Thoughts.

The article opens with the following paragraphs:

For decades, Alan S. Blinder — Princeton University economist, former Federal Reserve Board vice chairman and perennial adviser to Democratic presidential candidates — argued, along with most economists, that free trade enriches the U.S. and its trading partners, despite the harm it does to some workers. “Like 99% of economists since the days of Adam Smith, I am a free trader down to my toes,” he wrote back in 2001.

Politicians heeded this advice and, with occasional dissents, steadily dismantled barriers to trade. Yet today Mr. Blinder has changed his message — helping lead a growing band of economists and policy makers who say the downsides of trade in today’s economy are deeper than they once realized.

Mr. Blinder, however, is definitely opposed to protectionism. Instead:
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Krugman and Friedman – Part One

March 30, 2007 by 2 Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a proponent of socialistic state-planning, takes a shot at Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman.

My neighbor David Lane asked for reactions to Mr. Krugman’s essay, which appeared in the February 15, 2007, edition of “The New York Review of Books.” Mr. Krugman pays tribute to the late Milton Friedman, but disagrees with some aspects of his analysis of economic cause-and-effect.

Paul Krugman is a controversial apologist for rather far-left-liberal political and economic views. He is by training and former profession an economist himself. Before joining the Times as a columnist, he was held in high regard among academic economists. Today he is seen more as a propagandist whose economic predictions, usually damning Republic moves such as tax cuts, have often been notoriously wrong.
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Art and Degeneration

March 29, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Art historically expressed the highest aspirations of society. In the 20th century art reversed field.

I had the pleasure today of viewing an exhibition of three-dimensional photo collages by Renee Kahn, who has an unerring eye for the artistic aspects of reality. Her subject was “Urban Dreamscapes: Stamford as a Work of Art.”

The occasion was a discussion panel (an artist, an art critic, a film historian-columnist) limning the 20th century setting of art and film as background for Renee’s work.

I was forcibly struck by recurrent themes in their presentations, some intended, some paradoxical.

A dominant theme was art, including movies, as recorder of the degeneration of life quality in the great cities.

What came across, however, was the presenters’ disdain for the source of order that historically had prevented that degeneration before the 20th century.
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Tim Robbins Two

March 26, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Stalin recognized that movies in the 1930s had become the most powerful propaganda tool for influencing mass opinion. That’s why he ordered the Communist Party USA to organize Hollywood screenwriters and crafts workers into Communist dominated labor unions.

Labor Unions: Double-Edged Blade described the affinity of actor-director Tim Robbins for Communist labor unions in Hollywood of the 1930s. The message Mr. Robbins conveys in his film “Cradle Will Rock” is essentially the original Communist Party USA (CPUSA) propaganda line at the time setting of the movie.

Seeing the great success of Leni Riefenstahl’s movies in creating public approval for the Nazi regime in 1934 and 1935, Stalin directed that Hollywood be organized to propagandize for the Soviet Union and the Communist cause.

V. J. Jerome, the CPUSA cultural commissar at party headquarters in New York City, sent Stanley Lawrence to Hollywood for that purpose in 1935. The aim was to create a single, industry-wide union that could shut down any Hollywood studio that balked at filming scripts approved by the CPUSA.
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Labor Unions: Double-Edged Blade

March 25, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Liberals see labor unions through rose-colored glasses. Reality is somewhat different.

Tuesday’s edition of the Stamford Advocate, my local newspaper, has a front-page article about actor-director Tim Robbins’s attempt to revive public interest in his 1999 film “Cradle Will Rock.” Mr. Robbins, a resident of the adjoining Westchester County town of Pound Ridge, spoke to a Stamford audience the night before at the Avon Theatre Film Center on Bedford Street.

Mr. Robbins’s movie, according to the Wikipedia:

… chronicles the process and events that surrounded the production of the original 1937 musical The Cradle Will Rock by Marc Blitzstein. Tim Robbins, in his third film as director, adapts history to create this fictionalized account of the original production, bringing in other stories of the time to produce this commentary on the role of art and power in the 1930s, particularly amidst the struggles of the 1930s labor movement and the corresponding appeal of socialism and communism among many intellectuals and working class people of that time.

Mr. Robbins’s evidently identifies emotionally with labor unions of the 1930s and sees business as a source of evil.

In a speech given at an antiwar rally in New York City’s Central Park on October 6, 2002, he said:
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Warriors for God

March 22, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The Old Testament story of David and Goliath offers guidance to living a true Christian life.

Sunday’s sermon at the Long Ridge Congregational Church (non-UCC) in North Stamford, Connecticut, was delivered by Rev. David Smith, who heads the Pivot Ministries.

Pivot Ministries reorient men out of the thralldom of drugs and alcohol by giving them the personal experience of Jesus Christ’s saving love. They do a wonderful job, guiding men of all ages and from all walks of life along an 18-month program.

Pivot’s website is http://www.pivotministries.org/ . They need contributions to carry on. Contact them and give them your support.
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First Corrupt Them, Then Control Them

March 21, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

By removing the Judeo-Christian ethos of morality and personal responsibility from our culture, Liberal-Progressives have led Americans into financial ruin.

A recent New York Times editorial titled Homeowners at Risk lamented the upsurge of mortgage payment delinquencies and the likely wave of foreclosures.

In that regard, the Times editorialists opined:

Responding to the mortgage bankers’ grim report, Senator Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Banking Committee and a presidential hopeful, broached the possibility of federal help for struggling homeowners. The most plausible relief measures — detailed in a new report by the Center for American Progress, a liberal research and advocacy group — involve federal boosts to existing state and local programs. Those include counseling to help strapped families plan for rising monthly payments and renegotiate their loans, legal aid and short-term loans for eligible borrowers. One study shows that a federal grant of $25 million could replicate proven local programs in other areas now experiencing spikes in foreclosures.

Implicit in the editorial is the assumption that it should have been the Federal government’s responsibility, first, to keep borrowers from assuming debt beyond their capacities, and, second, to bail borrowers out, no questions asked.
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Times Supports Abstract Savagery

March 21, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

New York Times editorialists equate morality with pagan environmental worship, doing so in the name of an abstraction called “the planet.”

In a New York Times editorial of March 10, 2007, titled Evangelical Environmentalism, the editors wrote, in part:

Whether or not you agree with [the conservative Christian wing of the Republican Party] about, say, homosexuality and abortion — and we emphatically do not — it is antiquated to limit the definition of morality to the way humans behave among humans.

Those days have been over ever since it became apparent that humans — busy thinking only about their own lives — had the power to destroy huge numbers of species, whole landscapes of habitat and, in fact, the balance of life on earth. The greatest moral issue of our time is our responsibility to the planet and to all its inhabitants.
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Liberal Theories of Human Nature

March 17, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

If liberal theories are correct, humans are passive bundles of nerves at the mercy of intellectual tyrants.

If only what we can detect and measure with our physical senses is real, then a human being is no more than a mechanism for registering pleasure or pain. This is a fundamental premise of psychology, one of the social sciences created by the French Encyclopedists. Liberals don’t buy the idea that people might be self-governed by their consciences and their moral sense. They presume that people are motivated only by desires for sensual gratification, power, or money.

Hence the extraordinary importance attached to Sigmund Freud’s theories at the beginning of the 20th century.

Psychology reflected this materialism perfectly in its behaviorist school of thought later in the 20th century. J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner went so far as to dismiss, not only the human soul, but even conscious thought as determinants of human behavior. The idea of consciousness, they said, was pre-scientific superstition and witchcraft. Taking materialism to the extreme, they theorized that the only determinants of behavior are external environmental factors, which completely outweigh inherited characteristics.
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The Genealogy of American Liberal-Progressive Gnosticism

March 16, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Whence came the deformed conceptions of anti-Constitutional, regulatory government and judicial activism?

American liberal-socialism is the gnostic descendant of the French Revolution and its Reign of Terror. The genealogical connection begins with Henri de Saint-Simon, the French intellectual who codified the doctrine of socialism in the first decades of the 1800s, shortly after the Revolution.

His colleagues and followers, including Auguste Comte, formed a body of disciples known as the Saint-Simonians. They spread the Gnostic gospel to German universities, where it became mixed with the philosophies of Fichte and Hegel.

During the ferment preceding the French Revolution, the same intellectual influences produced the English constitutional radicalism of Jeremy Bentham, the founder of Utilitarianism. In 1789, the year of the French Revolution, he published Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, which outlined the Utilitarian doctrine that all political action should be in the form of regulations scientifically calculated to produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people. In this, Americans will recognize the genesis of New Deal regulatory agencies and the liberal-Progressive obsession with controlling every aspect of our daily lives.

At first hearing, the Utilitarian principle of “the greatest good for the greatest number” sounds good. The rub is that implementing it necessitates overturning existing social traditions and constitutional principles, just as President Franklin Roosevelt did with his 1930s New Deal.
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Mr. Ignatius, Meet Mr. Bok

March 15, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius thinks that American colleges are just swell. Former Harvard president Derek Bok disagrees.

David Ignatius’s opinion piece was published in today’s Wall Street Journal. Its opening paragraphs are the following:

Higher-Ed Superpower
By DAVID IGNATIUS
The Washington Post
March 12, 2007

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — When people think about American power in the world, they usually list the country’s forbidding arsenal of bombers, aircraft carriers and troops. Yet America’s greatest strategic asset these days might not be its guns, but its universities.

Higher education is arguably the last area in which the United States dominates the world. We’re discovering the limits of military power in Iraq, the pressures of economic competition from China and India, the vulnerability of our financial markets to sudden changes abroad. But in this globalized world, American universities remain the gold standard.

Mr. Ignatius’s home venue, The Washington Post, is not the most radically liberal of the major newspapers, but it’s up there in the rankings.
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Need We Fear Inflation?

March 13, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Contrary to the popular understanding, higher wage rates and higher oil prices do not cause inflation. They are symptoms of the real danger.

News reports express concern that the tightening labor market and increasing oil prices will lead to increased inflation. This is an upside-down view of reality.

Inflation is nothing more nor less than an increasing ratio of money to available goods and services.

Higher prices – rising wages or higher oil prices, for example – result from two things.

First is excessive money supply creation and the resulting excessive amount of bank credit pumped into the economy.

Second is a change in the balance between supply and demand. Wages will rise whenever increasing business activity necessitates hiring more workers, with the requisite skills and experience, than are available in the needed locations. Oil prices will rise because demand exceeds current or anticipated supplies in the locations where oil is needed.

In either case, price increases are the result, not a cause.
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Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. – New Deal Apologist

March 8, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The recent death of Professor Schlesinger brings to mind his wonderfully well-written historical surveys. It also reminds us of the misguided liberalism he ardently espoused.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., was a history professor at Harvard and the City University of New York, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for works of history, and a member of President John F. Kennedy’s White House staff.

His life-long devotion to liberal-Progressivism came partly from his family background, and partly from his undergraduate education at Harvard. When he received his degree in 1938, Harvard was in the vanguard of the relatively small number of atheistic and secular universities that were educating the Eastern liberal establishment.

Among his many historical analyses, one of the best known is The Age of Roosevelt, a three-volume, worshipful panegyric to the vast liberal-socialistic changes wrought by President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
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What Really Matters?

March 7, 2007 by 1 Comment

-By Thomas E. Brewton

With turmoil in our foreign policy, a new Congress in session, and the prospect of higher taxes to finance an expansion of the secular welfare-state, what should be our personal priorities? The Apostle Paul’s letter to the church at Galatia refocuses us on the most important things in our lives.

Sunday’s sermon at the Long Ridge Congregational Church (non-UCC) in North Stamford, Connecticut, was delivered by Capt. Brian Thomas, leader of our local Salvation Army mission.

Our nation is beset with enemies. Our government and our society are moving at an accelerating rate further into moral degradation. Most of us can do little about that as individuals.

What we can do is order our lives to embody the Apostle Paul’s desiderata in his letter to the church at Galatia. Living more helpful, more courteous, and less self-centered lives not only makes us feel better, but also brightens the lives of those around us. Living that kind of life is a witness that may bring others to God.
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Echoes of 1929?

March 7, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Tuesday’s big drop in stock market averages and questionable financial market conditions bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s.

A great many economic conditions, as well as the structure of the financial markets, are different from those of the 1920s. Not all of the differences, however, are reassuring.

Recent news reports tell us that banks’ reserves against risky loans such as sub-prime mortgages are at low points. Money is pouring into hedge funds and private equity groups. The massive prevalence of derivative securities in portfolios of pension funds, insurance companies, and commercial banks is worrisome. In 1998, the cratering of Greenwich’s Long Term Capital Management, because of unanticipated consequences of its derivatives investments, threatened to sink the international financial markets.
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World Trade Towers: a Socialist Fiasco

March 4, 2007 by 1 Comment

-By Thomas E. Brewton

We can count on government planners to produce the most inefficient projects conceivable by the human mind. Manhattan’s Freedom Tower, intended to rise on the site of 9/11 destruction, is an egregious example.

A recent Bloomberg News article reports, ” ‘The Freedom Tower isn’t economically feasible under present circumstances,’ said Douglas Durst, a third-generation New York developer whose company is building Bank of America’s new offices in midtown Manhattan.”

New York City, the nation’s most socialistically ingrained municipality, in the nation’s premier socialist state, has a long history of public works boon-doggles, of which the Freedom Tower is just the latest.

One of the earliest was the city’s efforts in the 1920s to compete with, and to destroy economically, the privately-owned IRT West Side subway lines. The chosen vehicle was Mayor Jimmy Walker’s IND subway system (famous, if nothing else, for Duke Ellington’s theme song, “Take the A Train”). In the end, both lines were economically unsustainable without city subsidies.
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Rational Evolutionary Hypothesis?

March 1, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Evolutionists make truly wild assumptions to fill the gaps in their hypotheses. Check out Richard Dawkins’s thesis that DNA originated spontaneously in inorganic mud crystals.

Richard Dawkins is one of today’s most widely known defenders of Darwinian evolution. Professor Dawkins goes beyond defending evolution, using extravagant language to attack the personal qualifications of anyone who questions Darwinian evolution. Of such people, he opined, It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).

Needless to say, as a believer in evolution, professor Dawkins regards himself as not ignorant and not stupid. Yet, some of his speculations, to a non-believer in evolution, appear to be a few cards short of a full deck.
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A New Deal Frame of Mind

February 26, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

With our radical left-wing Congress setting forth on a mission to preserve and enlarge the welfare-state, it’s appropriate to review the arrogant destructiveness of their New Deal predecessors who created the welfare-state.

A root of New Deal failure to restore prosperity in the 1930s was its authors’ ignorance of business and finance, overlain with simplistic arrogance. The same may be said of today’s San Francisco and East Coast liberal-socialists.

The New Dealers were a brash, cock-sure bunch who came from the academic world to Washington intending to wipe out as much of our capitalistic system as possible. They viewed the business and financial communities as a cross between Neanderthal ignorance and evil perversity. They assumed that all right-thinking people were united in the view that businessmen and bankers existed to oppress “the people.”

While 1950s apologists like liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., prettied the recollections of the New Deal by describing it as “saving business from itself,” the facts show clearly that the New Dealers were rabid anti-capitalistic socialists.

Describing the literally revolutionary frame of mind of FDR and his “brains trust,” the author of The New Dealers, published in 1934, wrote:

Roosevelt had the benefit of several other great national experiments as useful points of reference for the American New Deal. He had before him the spectacle of the Soviet Union with its recent dramatization of economic reorganization through the Five-Year Plan. He had before him the example of Fascist Italy with its regimentation of business, labor and banking in the “Corporative State.” He had before him the instances of Kemal [Ataturk in Turkey], Mussolini and Hitler in restoring national pride and self-confidence to beaten or dispirited peoples.

A key word in the foregoing, which illuminates the entirety of liberalism, is experiments. Liberal-socialism-progressivism is all about ivory-tower theory aimed at constructing sand castles in mid-air, without the benefit of a foundation in real life.
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How FDR Destroyed the Dollar

February 24, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Until 1933, the U. S. dollar was the among the strongest and most stable currencies in the world. With the stroke of a pen, President Franklin Roosevelt torpedoed it. We are still plagued with the resulting inflation.

All governments lust for taxpayers’ money. The ability to direct the expenditure of large sums of money confers great power upon political leaders. But the spending requirements that President Franklin Roosevelt had in mind upon taking office in 1933 were of extraordinary dimensions. Inflating the currency, in socialist theory, was a way to create more money for that end.

In the 1920s, after the disillusionment of World War I, socialism enjoyed great vogue in the United States. Social Gospel ministers extolled it, intellectuals lauded it, and popular magazines ran many favorable articles about it. In that period, the general public had no awareness of the horrors then being effected in the name of socialism in the USSR, and Hitler’s National Socialism was still in the future.

It was against that background that Franklin Roosevelt campaigned for the presidency in 1932 with the promise to give state-planning a try. Described in that way, it seemed to be no more than a proposal to coordinate government spending more effectively.
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00Publius Contributor - Constitution - Economy/Finances - History - President - Society/Culture - Thomas Brewton - Uncategorized

Storm Ahead?

February 24, 2007 by

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The economic barometer has been falling for many months. Analysts have, with greater frequency of late, expressed fears of a major dollar devaluation.

This is not a prediction of specific events or the timing thereof. But you should become aware of the many economic warning signs that have become increasingly evident in recent years.

Typical is the following quotation from the Wall Street Journal’s February 17, 2007, editorial How Expansions Die:

Thus does a virtuous circle caused by easy money turn vicious, and interest rates aren’t even all that high — at least not yet. The Fed’s concern over housing’s potential effect on the broader economy is no doubt one reason it has kept short-term rates at 5.25% for several months, despite signs that inflation risks remain. Notwithstanding yesterday’s monthly inflation statistics (a function mainly of energy prices), gold has climbed back up to $665 an ounce, the dollar is weak, and “core” inflation remains above the Fed’s 2% upper limit.

The underlying problem is too many dollars sloshing around the world, the result of the Federal government’s unsatisfiable desire for more spending, along with consumers’ imprudent willingness to go into debt, spending more than they make. These two economic drivers are facilitated by the Federal Reserve’s role as creator of fiat money in limitless quantities. The inevitable result is inflation, which by definition is devaluation of the currency.
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