[woods]

He thinks rebuilding stuff we already had is just as good as building new stuff?

[woods]

Bharat is correct. This is also Rothbard’s point about how businesses can’t just “pass the tax on to the consumer.” When a new tax is passed on a business, some free-market people lecture the “progressive” supporters of the tax by saying, “You know, that tax just gets passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices anyway.” But that can’t be right. If the firm, or the industry at large, could get away with higher prices without compromising overall sales revenues, why weren’t they charging those higher prices already?

No, the way in which such taxes are “passed on” to the consumer is more indirect. Marginal firms that cannot compete with the burden of the new tax go out of business. This means less production, and this lower supply of goods means higher prices can be charged by the remaining firms.

[woods]

My family and I have been in the process of moving, a little at a time, for the past couple weeks, so I’m afraid life has been rather hectic around here. But better late than never.

What I recommend you do is re-post this question to our new discussion forum on Austrian economics and invite Prof. Herbener’s response. Rothbard discusses “underconsumptionism” a bit in the opening section of America’s Great Depression. There are many avenues from which to attack it, one of them being Bharat’s argument, another being the empirical case: if “underconsumption” is the cause, why did consumer-goods industries do considerably better in the crash than producer-goods industries? In my lecture on this I give some of the statistics.

[woods]

This option is currently available also for the Western civilization courses, and within a few days will be available for U.S. history as well.

[woods]

This discussion thread is now at an end. I add only a few things: the Talmud did not originate in Babylon, and the Jerusalem Talmud is in fact older than the Babylonian Talmud. There is no NT evidence that Jesus was attempting to restore a pre-Babylonian exile Hebrew faith, although he certainly differs in his teachings from many of the contemporary Pharisees. The Khazar theory of Ashkenazi origins is not generally accepted, although there are reputable people who take it seriously.

[woods]

This sounds to me like an after-the-fact rationalization. The U.S. engaged in a crash mobilization of resources with the entry into World War II. The federal government didn’t do anything, to my knowledge, of any conceivable military significance regarding roads until the interstate highway system under Eisenhower, a policy that was expressly billed as defense related (in order to pass constitutional muster — kind of quaint that as recently as the 1950s we still saw some effort to find constitutional authorization for federal activities).

But even if your critic’s claim is true, in your shoes I would note that the person is evading the question. The point of FDR’s policies was not military readiness. The point was economic recovery. This, clearly, they did not accomplish.

[woods]

By today’s standards many of them would indeed be considered poor. But by their standards they were enjoying amenities that no one a generation earlier could even have imagined, much less possessed. That’s what I would keep in mind. To them, this was a level of prosperity few could ever have dreamed of being enjoyed by the common man.

[woods]

I agree with the recommendations to view these lectures. I also recommend the book The Illusion of a Conservative Reagan Revolution, by Larry Schwab. In the cases of both presidents, of course, essentially nothing was actually repealed under either of them.

[woods]

That people may work harder under trying circumstances is a claim we can set out to observe, but it isn’t a grain of truth from the broken window fallacy. That fallacy deals exclusively with the idea that the actual repairing of broken things can stimulate growth. That is clearly false. That people may work harder, etc., when things are broken and they have lots to do is an interesting possibility, but not part of the initial claim.

And presumably, if this were the case — that is, if it were true that people would work so much harder that it would even be worth destroying some things in order to bring forth this greater commitment to work — then surely some entrepreneur would already have thought of trying it out. The fact that no one does is, I think, a good indication that the observation falls short.

[woods]

Even though it’s written for a popular-level periodical, this article by Jim Powell has some useful ideas: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/features/theodore-roosevelt-big-government-man/

Powell goes into more detail, and assembles the various sources on this, in Bully Boy, his biography of TR.

[woods]

My apologies for the delay here; Kevin has been having some difficulties with the forums, but they should be resolved within 24 hours or so.

[woods]

“Almost every ‘book’ in the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece and Rome (spanning a period of more than 3500 years) is a papyrus scroll.”

Read more: http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=aa92#ixzz1tcUbyRJf

[woods]

Sons, you write: “I’ve heard a couple of times the argument of proponents of the industrial revolution that people voluntarily decided to move from the fields into the factories. Apparently they favored factory work to that on the fields. Thus this proves that the workers benefited from the industrial revolution.

“But I’ve also heard the argument that because of the extreme population growth (caused by the agricultural revolution) there wasn’t enough work to be done in the agricultural sector.”

These are two ways of saying the same thing. If incomes were falling in the agricultural sector, that’s the reason people did voluntarily move into industry. In terms of their material well-being it was the best option available to them. Since there was no magical way to make agriculture more profitable, and since industry is, as Mises said, what literally saved them from starvation, we should be thrilled that this option existed for them.

[woods]

Eric, no, they just made it into a gigantic book, with thinner paper. Unabridged.

[woods]

My apologies for just seeing this post now. I added the Rothbard source before seeing this post, because I remembered it recently. If there’s anything else missing, please let me know and I’ll add it right away. I am entering middle age, after all….

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