A History of the American People by Paul Johnson

My favorite historian is Paul Johnson, and my favorite historical subject is America, so combined in A History of the American People by Paul Johnson, it is a thing of beauty!

Although a Brit, Johnson exudes love and support for America and all it stands for. In fact, his dedication reads, "This book is dedicated to the people of America—strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched."

Johnson focuses on personalities and the associated events more than the "forces" and "trajectories" favored today. Also, he does none of the Zinn-style of telling history from the point of view of the disenfranchised or outcasts. Rather, he tells the story of those who actually made history and he is not afraid to pass judgment on them. This is one thing I love about his style. He freely acknowledges that these are flesh-and-blood humans with good and bad qualities, exercising their free will and making decisions that impacted history. Nothing is fore-ordained. People, not forces, shape history. And their legacy is fair game for fair judgment.

He does not begin his history with where many begin, pre-history and the Native Americans. He starts with the men we know who ventured to a New World to make something great. Christopher Columbus shows up on page one. It is not that the history of Native people is unimportant, but it simply plays little role in the foundations of America. And America's story is the one he's telling.

He begins by detailing Spanish exploration and then goes into the failure of Roanoke. Interestingly, and another reason to love Johnson as a historian, he gives as one reason for the failure the fact that it was an entirely secular effort with no religious dimension. Johnson, a devout Catholic, does not shy away from the role of religion in forming America. The theme will resurrect time and again. Yet his is not a jingoist story of America as a Christian nation, but simply one that has been informed and shaped by Protestantism. In telling the story of the Pilgrims, he details the desire for religions freedom and liberty. Yet, believing as they did that Catholicism shackles liberty, they defined liberty as the liberty to practice their form of religion. From the beginning we had a tension surrounding the definition of liberty, while making clear that it was a central American value.

The tension with liberty continued in the introduction of African slavery into the Carolinas and the treatment of Native Americans. England took little notice of either issue, leaving the colonies to develop their own systems and regulations as regards to both. Although the royal colonies had governors sent from England, the mother country was far more concerned with trade. By and large, the colonies were on their own. As such, they quickly developed different norms and customs, making each colony distinctly different from the others. But the Great Awakening came along, uniting the colonists in religious fervor and helping to create a distinct American.

The French and Indian War took the foundation laid by the Great Awakening and sparked a consciousness that would lead to Revolution. The victory by Britain produced a great empire and simultaneously saw a rise in incompetent and arrogant leadership. "It is now time to see the origins and progress of the breakdown between Britain and America through the eyes of a man who was involved in all its stages and did his considerable best to prevent it—Benjamin Franklin." (p. 134) This is where Paul Johnson shines. He uses real people and their lives to highlight historical events. In fact, I would argue that the close study of a few individuals would be enough to inform the average American of almost all the American history he needs to know. Johnson then shifts to a study of Thomas Jefferson as "the archetypal figure of the Entire Enlightenment." (p. 143) He's similar to Franklin in many ways, but a representative of a different class of people who would impact the American project. It was this man who would give us, "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." as the fledgling colony declared its independence from Great Britain. The next individual that requires careful study is obviously George Washington. From the time hostilities broke out until his death, he will be the central figure in the formation of a new and distinct America.

After winning the war, the question became how to govern this sui generis entity? "There is no question that the Declaration of Independence was, to those who signed it, a religious as well as a secular act, and that the Revolutionary War had the approbation of divine providence. They had won it with God's blessing and, afterwards, they drew up their framework of government with God's blessing, just as in the 17th century the colonists had drawn their Compacts and Charters and Orders and Instruments, with God peering over their shoulders." (p. 204) Yet the Constitution makes little mention of God. Johnson attributes this to a happy coincident of history. "As it happens, by a historical accident, it was actually drawn up at the high tide of 18th-century secularism, which was as yet unpolluted by the fanatical atheism and the bloody excesses of its culminating storm, the French Revolution." (p. 205) For a brief period of time, it was possible for a very religious people to form a government that neither mandated nor proscribed religion. Because of this, America has never had a religious war and continues to be have a healthy religious flourishing to this day. Johnson, a devout Catholic, is the rare historian who does not treat religious belief as an interesting artifact of a backward people. He believes in his subjects sincerity and understands it. This kind of understanding allows Johnson to make a brilliant defense of the original intent of the First Amendment. "This guarantee [of religious freedom] has been widely, almost willfully, misunderstood in recent years, and interpreted as meaning that the federal government is forbidden by the Constitution to countenance or subsidize even indirectly the practice of religion. That would have astonished and angered the Founding Fathers." (p. 209) Although wisely not incorporating a national church, the Founders understood that a self-governing nation was appropriate only for a religious and moral people.

Now America has to get on to the hard task of actually governing. Early presidents Washington, Adams, and Jefferson set the tone and structure of how the new nation would proceed. Alexander Hamilton, a most forward-thinking economic mind, would place the nations fractured economy on solid footing. In addition, the longest-serving Supreme Court justice, John Marshall, would outline the contours of the new judiciary. It is nothing short of a miracle that the men needed to guide the experiment were all on the scene at the same time. The fact that they had heated disagreements about the ends and means was even more beneficial as we needed all of them together to form a balance.

By the time we get to Andrew Jackson, America is more mature and ready to be unleashed from the elites that have guided her. He enters like a force of nature and forever alters the character and trajectory of America. A study of his life would again tell us so much of what we need to know about life in the early republic. He was born in 1767 and so was literally born into a revolutionary time. By the time he entered politics, he was a self-made man, able to take advantage of the freedoms offered in America. Unlike his predecessors, he was from the West and the first military hero since Washington. He ushered in unprecedented democracy and expansion, representing a young nation chomping at the bit to make something of itself. "Jackson thought the people were instinctively right and moral, and Big Government, of the kind he could see growing up in Washington, fundamentally wrong and immoral. His task, as he saw it, was to liberate and empower this huge moral popular force by appealing to it over the heads of the entrenched oligarchy, the corrupt ruling elite." (p. 329

A credit to its success is that America came to be described, by Benjamin Franklin, as a "happy mediocrity." Johnson says, "The fact that, unless we investigate closely, we hear so little about the mass of the population is itself a historical point of great importance, because it testifies by its eloquent silence to the success of the republican experiment." (p. 283) In the first half of the 19th century Americans got about the business pursuing happiness. Freedom was literally paying off. "Not only were American wage-rates high, but you kept your earnings to spend on your family. Then there were other blessings. no conscription. No political police. No censorship. No legalized class distinction. Most employers ate at the same table as their hands. No one (except slaves) called anyone 'Master.'" (p. 289) Prosperity allowed these early Americans to consider universal education. Horace Mann "opened the first 'normal' school in the United States at Lexington in 1839, and thence reorganized the entire primary and secondary education system of the state, with longer terms, a more scientific and 'modern' pedagogy, higher salaries and better teachers, decent, clean, and properly heated schoolhouses, and al the element of a first-class public school system." (p. 302) Although government-run education became problematic at the turn of the next century, a country that could afford to educate all its citizens was an unheard of luxury.

Into this growing, prosperous nation the issue of slavery remained to be tackled. The contradictions of freedom demanded an answer to the question of human chattel. The Founders recognized the inherit hypocrisy and predicted a war would result. Adams stated that "its result must be the extirpation of slavery from this whole continent and, calamitous and devastating as this course of events must be, so Glorious would be the final issue that, as God should judge me, I dare not say it is not be desired." (p. 319) But that predicted war would be delayed by compromise time and again until it finally broke in 1860, which allowed the nation to solidify the gains made by the Revolution and fight a war for freedom for all from a place of solid strength.

This strength came from Americans' belief in the greatness of their destiny. As one essay put it in 1838,

"The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles: to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High-the Sacred and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphere—its roof the firmament of the star-studded heavens—and its congregation the Union of many Republics, comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling and owning no man master, but governed by God's natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood-of ‘peace and goodwill among men’." (p. 371)

Yet as de Tocqueville would note, slavery was a chain holding back those who practiced it. "'On both sides [of the Ohio River] the soil is equally fertile, the situation just as favorable.' But Kentucky, because of slavery, is inhabited 'by a people without energy, without ardor, without a spirit of enterprise.' He was led, he said, again and again to the same conclusion: leaving aside the slave states, 'the American people, taking them all in all, are not only the most enlightened in the world, but (something I place well above that advantage), they are the people whose practical, political education is the most advanced.'" (p. 391) Into this setting arrives Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1853, making the moral case for the abolitionist position. Not only did it help spark the Civil War, it probably kept Britain from coming to the aid of the South.

Of that event, Johnson states, "The civil war, in which are included the causes and consequences, constitutes the central event in American history. It is also America's most characteristic event which brings out all that the United States is, and is not. It made America a nation, which it was not before. For America, as we have seen, was not prescriptive, its people forged together by a forgotten process in the darkness of prehistory, emerging from it already a nation by the time it could record its own doings. It was, rather, an artificial state or series of states, bound together by negotiated agreements and compacts, charters and covenants. It was made by bits of parchment, bred by lawyers. The early Americans, insofar as they had a nationality, were English (or more properly British) with an English national identity and culture." (p. 423) America became America because of the Civil War.

I believe an interesting case can be made comparing slavery at this time to abortion today. Both sides are locked into their beliefs with little movement, yet I don't believe it will end in war. But as Abraham Lincoln said, the nation cannot stand divided. It will become all one thing or all another. Today we see what I believe is the pro-abortion's last, desperate gasp, just as slavery proponents became much more shrill and vociferous as they saw their strangle hold on other humans slipping from their grasp. "The aggressive message of the South was: slavery must be extended because it makes economic sense for America. But beneath this aggressive tone was the deep insecurity of Southerners who had no real moral answer to the North's case and knew in their hearts that the days of slavery were numbered." (p. 432)

Enter Abraham Lincoln. Here again, Johnson turns to an individual to tell the story of a nation. "It was because slavery made him miserable, and because he thought it was destroying the nation, not least the South, that Lincoln reentered politics and helped to create the new Republican Party, primarily to prevent slavery's extension. Looking back with the hindsight of history, we tend to assume that slavery was a lost cause from the start and the destruction of the old South inevitable. But to a man of Lincoln's generation, the South appeared to have won all the political battles, and all the legal ones." (p. 441) But Lincoln had powerfully put himself in the camp of liberalism and nationalism, two very strong forces in the mid-19th century. His Emancipation Proclamation sealed the legitimacy of the North's cause.

As a believer, once again, Johnson does not shy from the spiritual component of American history. "As against all these raucous certainties, there were the doubts, the puzzlings, and the agonizing efforts of Abraham Lincoln to rationalize God's purposes. To anyone who reads his letters and speeches, and the records of his private conversations, it is hard not to believe that, whatever his religious state of mind before the war again, he acquired faith of a kind before it ended. His evident and total sincerity shines through all his words as the war took its terrible toll. He certainly felt the spirit of guidance. 'I am satisfied,' he wrote, “that when the Almighty wants me to do or not to do a particular thing, he finds a way of letting me know it.' He thus waited, as the Cabinet papers show, for providential guidance at certain critical points of the war. He never claimed to be the personal agent of God's will, as everybody else seemed to be doing. But he wrote: “If it were not for my firm belief in an overriding providence it would be difficult for me, in the midst of such complications of affairs, to keep my reason in its seat. But I am confident that the Almighty has his plans and will work them out; and ... they will be the wisest and the best for us.' When asked if God was on the side of the North, he replied: 'I am not at all concerned about that, for I know the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord's side. As he put it, 'I am not bound to win but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to the light I have.'" (p. 471)

Once the war was over, America had a decision to make—how should the South be treated as it was brought back into the Union. One school of thought was that of the Radical Republicans, hatred and punishment. Second was the moderate Republicans who sought to bring the states back into the Union slowly, while working to guarantee Constitutional rights to the citizens of the South, Black and White alike. The third option, that of the new president Andrew Johnson, was clemency, pardon, and rapid normalization of relations. Of course the worst of all worlds happened. The South believed they were owed clemency but the Radical Republicans imposed a harsh Reconstruction. The moderates continued to push for Constitutional protections in the face of a racist president and a recalcitrant South.

Johnson sums up the heartbreaking results, "The South, its whites virtually united in hatred of their governments, hit back by force. The years 1866–71 saw the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, a secret society of vigilantes, who wore white robes to conceal their identities, and who rode by night to do justice. They were dressed to terrify the black community, and did so; and where terror failed they used the whip and the noose. And they murdered carpetbaggers too. They also organized race-riots and racial lynchings. They were particularly active at election-time in the autumn, so that each contest was marked by violence and often by murder. Before the Civil War, Southern whites had despised the blacks and occasionally feared them; now they learned to hate them, and the hate was reciprocated. A different kind of society came into being, based on racial hatred. The Republican governors used state power in defense of blacks, scalawags, and carpetbaggers, and when state power proved inadequate, appealed to Congress and the White House. So Congress conducted inquiries and held hearings, and occasionally the White House sent troops. But the blacks and their white allies proved incapable of defending themselves, either by political cunning or by force."(p. 506) Reconstruction proved a failure, setting up the United States and specifically the South for a century of racial tensions.

Meanwhile, the North was anxious to put the war behind it and rush forward. As Americans moved into the frontiers, the conflicts with the Natives became more pronounced. Johnson summarizes, "The Indians were not murderous savages, who ought either to be detribalized and assimilated completely (as scores of thousands indeed were), or exterminated, or penned up in remote reservations—this being the view of the vast majority of 19th-century American whites. Nor were they sophisticated-primitive innocents, living in utopian and preservationist communities, brutally disturbed by cruel and heedless invaders of European extraction, that being the view of 20th-century romantic historians of Indian history. The more they, and the white settlers who displaced them, are studied in detail, and without prejudice on either side, the smaller the differences between them appear. Both Indians and whites were living in the same, often harsh country, and trying their best to master it, in different ways." (p. 518) Johnson believes the issues that led to the biggest conflicts were the Indians extreme fragmentation and general belief in the tribe's superiority to all other peoples, and their attitude toward settled farming, which was viewed as effeminate. While many Native Americans assimilated and lived successfully in white America, those that did not, were hamstrung by these two characteristics. Once again, the solution, Reservations, like Reconstruction, simply preserved and extenuated a bad situation.

Yet despite the violence on the Frontier, the American economy expanded rapidly. While England had been first out of the gate with industrialization, America was determined to surpass the mother country. "Americans were conscious, in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, that they were proud inhabitants of the world's wealthiest country, enjoying living standards unprecedented in the history of humanity. All around them they could see the thriving machinery and infrastructure of this wealth-creating process, and it was inevitable that the men who presided over this pul sating, throbbing, enriching system should inspire confidence and invite emulation." (p. 550) With a new class of "political mediocrities" Americans turned to the real movers and shakers, the men of extreme wealth, the entrepreneur class. Men like Andrew Carnegie, who rose to riches with a steel empire and gave half his wealth away, and money men like J.P. Morgan, who demanded absolute adherence to good character, found a place in the American's imaginations as archetypal heroes. Others like Thomas Edison and Louis Comfort Tiffany created beautiful and useful things as part of America's creator class. Culturally and economically, America was finally growing up and showing the world the way forward. Sadly, Johnson states, "That the United States, lifted up by an extraordinary combination of self-created wealth and native talent, became a great cultural nation in the second half of the 19th century is a fact which the world, and even Americans themselves, have been slow to grasp." (p. 585)

The extreme wealth and cultural progress was not without its detractors. Ironically calling themselves Progressives, this group sought to retard the growth and, well, progress of the American people. Horrified by the growing gap between the rich and the poor and convinced that government action was needed to level society out, socialism began to become attractive. Despite the fact the almost-monopolies of Standard Oil and U.S. Steel were creating cheaper and better products, do-gooders and muckrakers sought to break them up for the simple sin of being big. While becoming unimaginably wealthy themselves, the capitalists were bringing wealth and leisure possibilities to ordinary Americans. But the size of the companies and the extreme wealth generated were enough to attract those who wanted control for themselves.

Johnson summarizes the Progressives excellently, "The anti-bigness emotion, so characteristic of the decades between the Civil War and World War One--and becoming stronger with each—is worth looking at because it was unAmerican. It is necessary to distinguish between Populists, who aimed deliberately at the farming vote and agricultural prejudices, and Progressives, who tended to be highly educated intellectuals aiming at an urban audience… It has been argued that Progressivism was the hostile reaction of the educated middle class to the overwhelming power of Big Business, whose wealth and scale and lure elbowed them out of the political-economic picture entirely, or so they feared. Since the days of the Founding Fathers, the educated elite had guided, if they had not exactly run, the United States, and they felt their influence was being eroded by the sheer quantity of money now sloshing around in the bowels of America's great ship of state… careful [prosopographical] analysis shows that the great majority were solidly middle class, university graduates of old British stock... By 1900, however, a number of new political fashions had come together to constitute a broad-based educated left-gas-and-water (or municipal) socialism, which was worldwide, trust-busting, conservationism (anti-urban sprawl, pro-wilderness), health fanaticism, the notion of educated purposeful elites as ‘guardians of the people, which was shared by a wide range of elitists, from Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Benito Mussolini, and literary and artistic bohemianism.'" (p. 609)

Despite the attacks on the national success, America continued to grow. By the time of avowed Progressive Woodrow Wilson's presidency, however, it was time for America to take the international stage. "Americans enjoyed a laissez-faire society which was by no means unrestrained but whose limitations to their economic freedom were imposed by their belief in a God-ordained moral code rather than a government one devised by man. The rise of rural Populism, the development of muckraking, the appearance in the big cities of middle class Progressivism, and, not least, the romantic reformism and altruistic nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt-all these were premonitory symptoms of change. And under Wilson the changes actually began to take place, hastened and accelerated by America's fortuitous involvement in a catastrophic world war which destroyed Old Europe forever." (p. 627)

This new maturity ushered America into the familiar territory of modern day. It was time, in the Progressive's opinion, for America to grow up and fulfill the utopian promise the reformers believed they had be given. "Gradually, the progressive intelligentsia, and the bulk of the Democratic Party, began to see a strong federal government, with wide powers of intervention, as the defender of the ordinary man and woman against the excesses of corporate power. The notion of the Public Sector (good; needs to be expanded) as opposed to the Private Sector (potentially bad; needs to be invigilated and regulated) began to take possession of the minds of the do-gooders. For this purpose, it was necessary for the state to expand its revenues. Therefore a persona income tax, especially if it possessed progressive characteristics, and therefore was income-redistributive as well as revenue-raising, was a desirable institution." (p. 636)

From the ability to impose their political will, the Progressives moved to the desire to impose on the morality of Americans with the ill-fated Prohibition amendment. Johnson provides a great analysis, "The imposition of Prohibition, and its failure, illustrates perfectly a number of important principles in American history. First, it shows the widespread belief in America that utopia can be achieved in the here and-now and the millennium secured in this world, as well as the next. Second, it indicates a related belief that ‘Americanization' can be achieved by compulsion and law. Third, it draws attention to a weakness in American public opinion and policy—a tendency to will the end without willing the means ('freeing the blacks was another instance).... Fourth, the utopianism inherent in Prohibition came up against the utopianism inherent in the rooted and active American principle that freedom of enterprise must be totally unrestricted." (p. 680) Lack of effective enforcement led to the failure of the effort to clean up America and it was quickly repealed.

The 20s brought Harding and his "return to normalcy." It also landed Calvin Coolidge in the presidency. "Like his predecessor Harding, only more systematically and of set purpose and belief, Coolidge was a minimalist politician. He thought the essence of the republic was not so much democracy itself as the rule of law, and that the prime function of government was to uphold and enforce it." (p. 713) He was an incredible administrator, fighting budget deficits with a vengeance. Together with Harding, they let the market crash in 1921 with no government intervention. Had his method been followed in 1929, some argue the Great Depression may have been nothing more than another roll of the business cycle. His minimalism allowed America to prosper in a way that was "real, widespread, though not ubiquitous, and unprecedented." (p. 718) Coolidge chose not to run again, even though he knew the country could have used his steady guiding hand during the market correction he saw coming. Being president simply taxed him too much and he was not up for another term.

And the market did correct. Herbert Hoover reversed course dramatically from Coolidge and pulled every government lever he could. FDR doubled down on these policies. Johnson makes a good case that while all reasons the Great Depression became "great" are complicated, it seems clear that FDR's interventionist policies probable lengthened what should have been a much shorter recession. "The 1929 crash revealed... the naivety and ignorance of bankers, businessmen, Wall Street experts, and academic economists, high and low; it showed they did not understand the system they had been so confidently manipulating. They had tried to substitute their own well-meaning policies for what Adam Smith called the 'invisible hand' of the market and they had wrought disaster." (p. 734) Roosevelt's policies were erratic and followed no clear, discernible ideology, injecting fatal uncertainty into an already tenuous situation.

But then came World War II. FDR was in his element as a war-time president. Although he had railed against business before the war, he begged for their assistance once war was upon us. Johnson believes, "America won the war essentially by harnessing capitalist methods to the unlimited production of firepower and mechanical manpower." (p. 781) America had literally been preparing her whole life for this moment. And in this moment, she shone.  The apotheosis of her power became the atomic bomb. Johnson convincingly shows how this weapon of mass destruction was the only thing that would actually make the world safe for democracy. Truman, a simple man of simple convictions, made the decision to drop them on Japan with a clear conscience, knowing it was the best way forward. This plunged the United States into the role of international policeman as we took up the mantle of keeping the forces of evil at bay. This Truman Doctrine, combined with the Marshall Plan, caused America to be looked at as the world's savior as well as making it an object of hate. No one likes to be a dependent, but America continues to provide and protect, knowing it is ultimately best for the world.

As America entered the peaceful and prosperous 1950s, Eisenhower took the helm. He seems to have deliberately downplayed his own genius for the benefit of the country. "George Kennan came closer to the truth when he wrote that on foreign affairs Eisenhower was a man of keen political intelligence and penetration ... When he spoke of such matters seriously and in a protected official circle, insights of a high order flashed out time after time through the curious military gobbledygook in which he was accustomed to expressing and concealing his thoughts. At public press conferences Eisenhower used his gobbledygook to avoid giving answers which plain English could not conceal, and often pleaded ignorance for the same reason. He was Machiavellian enough to pretend to misunderstand his own translator when dealing with persistent foreigners. Transcripts of his secret conferences show the lucidity and power of his thoughts. His editing of drafts by speechwriters and of statements by Dulles reveal an excellent command of English which he could exercise when he chose. Churchill was one of the few men who appreciated him at his worth, and it could be said that they were the two greatest statesmen of the mid-20th century.” (p. 829)

Johnson spends considerable time on Nixon and Kennedy. It was clear that the media had a favorite and they would use their influence to control the narrative. Nixon was to be the bad guy and Kennedy the messianic figure. Johnson show clear disgust with the unfairness, describing Nixon in glowing terms and reserving some of his harshest criticisms for Kennedy. "By all historical standards, Nixon should have been an American media hero. He was a natural candidate for laurels in the grand old tradition of self-help, of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. He came from nowhere. His family background was respectable but obscure. He worked his way through an unfashionable college. He had no money except what he earned by his own efforts. He had, to begin with, no influential friends or connections. His life was dominated by a passionate desire to serve in public office, sometimes masquerading as brutal ambition, and by his patriotism and love of country, which knew no bounds. He was an autodidact and voracious reader, always trying to better himself, intellectually as well as professionally. He combined this earnest cultural endeavor with solid campaigning and administrative skills, which brought him early and continuing success, and with a modest private life which was morally impeccable." (p. 847)

Of Kennedy, Johnson says, "Jack never had his father's insatiable relish for money, power, and corruption. Most of his life he simply did old Joe's bidding. As he put it, ruefully: 'I guess Dad has decided he's going to be the ventriloquist, so that leaves me the role of dummy." In one important respect, Jack rejected the family tradition. Money did not interest him and he never troubled to learn anything about it. It was not that he was extravagant. Quite the contrary, he was mean...But, if he was not interested in making money, in most other respects he happily accepted the family philosophy, especially its central tenet: that the laws of God and the republic, admirable in themselves, did not apply to Kennedys, at any rate male ones. Like his father, he dealt with gangsters, when he felt so inclined. From the start he was taught by his father that bluff, freely laced with money—or outright mendacity if need be-could remove all difficulties." (p. 849) Johnson goes after Kennedy on every level, referring to his drug addiction, womanizing, poor political decision, outright lying, and marriage of convenience to Jackie. He even bursts the bubble on JFK's most notable success, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Johnson is not entirely sure that Kennedy did not make a bad situation worse.

Upon Kennedy's death and beatification, Lyndon Johnson found himself unexpectedly president. Although he had coveted the job his whole life, getting it under these circumstances seems to have affected him. The corrupt, racist threw himself into preserving the Kennedy legacy with a series of social programs designed to end poverty and bring about the utopian ideals so desired by the original Progressives. While greatly expanding government outlays in what would eventually prove to be a colossal waste of money, he also expanded America's role in Vietnam. This ultimately led to his inability to run again and win his second elected term. 

His unpopularity opened the door for Nixon's reappearance. Unfortunately, the hatred of the press meant that all Nixon's mistakes and errors in judgment would be magnified. Even spying on rival campaigns, which was apparently de rigueur , would be turned into a Constitutional crisis, referred today as Watergate.

Ford took over, pardoned Nixon, but was left with a very hostile Congress. This led to what is actually a bigger crisis than a 2-bit bungled spying campaign, the fall of Vietnam. Although America had won the war, after Nixon's resignation, "Ford was obliged to look on helplessly while such freedom as a decade of effort by America had secured for the peoples of Indochina was removed step by step. As US military aid to South Vietnam tailed off from 1973, the balance of armed power shifted decisively to the Communist regime in the North. By the end of the year the North had achieved a two to-one superiority and, in defiance of all the accords carefully worked out by Nixon and Kissinger, launched a general invasion. Bound hand and foot by Congress, Ford felt powerless to act and simply made verbal protests. In January 1975 the whole of central Vietnam had to be evacu ated and a million terrified refugees fled towards Saigon. In an appeal to Congress, Ford warned: ‘American unwillingness to provide adequate assistance to allies fighting for their lives could seriously affect our credibility throughout the world as an ally.' Congress did nothing. At his news conference on March 26 Ford again pleaded with Congress, warning of a massive shift in the foreign policies of many countries and a fundamental threat ... to the security of the United States. Congress paid no attention. Four weeks later, on April 21, the Vietnamese government abdicated. Marine helicopters lifted American officials, and a few Vietnamese allies, from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon, an image of flight and humiliation etched on the memories of countless Americans who watched it on TV. It was indeed the most shameful defeat in the whole of American history. The democratic world looked on in dismay at this abrupt collapse of American power, which had looked so formidable only two years before." (p. 908)

It took the presidency of Ronald Reagan to restore America's faith in itself. He presided over a genuine economic expansion and a peaceful foreign landscape. Although the media had developed a taste for blood and so Washington became a constant source of scandal and rumor-mongering. Most good and decent people seem to be scared off from such an environment which meant that America got Bill Clinton at the top. Scandal followed him in all he touched, whether it was financial dealing, womanizing, or shady behavior in governance. 

Finishing his history in 1997, Johnson concludes, "It is appropriate to end this history of the American people on a note of success, because the story of America is essentially one of difficulties being overcome by intelligence and skill, by faith and strength of purpose, by courage and persistence. America today, with its 260 million people, its splendid cities, its vast wealth, and its unrivaled power, is a human achievement without parallel. That achievement—the transformation of a mostly uninhabited wilderness into the supreme national artifact of history-did not come about without heroic sacrifice and great sufferings stoically endured, many costly failures, huge disappointments, defeats, and tragedies. There have indeed been many setbacks in 400 years of American history. As we have seen, many unresolved problems, some of daunting size, remain. But the Americans are, above all, a problem-solving people. They do not believe that anything in this world is beyond human capacity to soar to and dominate. They will not give up. Full of essential goodwill to each other and to all, confident in their inherent decency and their democratic skills, they will attack again and again the ills in their society, until they are overcome or at least substantially redressed. So the ship of state sails on, and mankind still continues to watch its progress, with wonder and amazement and sometimes apprehension, as it moves into the unknown waters of the 21st century and the third millennium. The great American republican experiment is still the cynosure of the world's eyes. It is still the first, best hope for the human race. Looking back on its past, and forward to its future, the auguries are that it will not disappoint an expectant humanity." (p. 976)

My favorite historian has written on my favorite historical topic, the history of America. He has covered us fairly, "warts and all", and he evokes a genuine love of an extraordinary place.

The Myth of the Robber Barons by Burton W. Folsom

I learned of this book because it is written by a member of Hillsdale faculty, and I have read books written by him before. This short book, The Myth of the Robber Barons by Burton W. Folsom, Jr. is a quick easy read. Although he has done tremendous research, he uses that information in a story-telling  manner that makes it easily digestible. 

The book is seven chapters, the first six deal with individual personalities and the last is a conclusion. Each of the men described enjoy a reputation for fabulous wealth somewhat tainted by an unearned reputation for unscrupulous dealings. 

Folsom begins by differentiating between "market entrepreneurs" and "political entrepreneurs." The former eschews government handouts and works under free market conditions. The latter needs government intervention in order to survive. He starts with Vanderbilt and his contributions to the steamship industry. While Robert Fulton was the first to build and begin a steamship company, he operated under a government-granted monopoly. Another operator hired young Cornelius Vanderbilt to try to break into that market. He ran illegal ferries until the Supreme Court finally struck down the monopoly as unconstitutional. In a free market, Vanderbilt undercut all his competition, drastically lowing rates. Eventually he took on the cross-Atlantic, subsidized mail carriers, where he had competition on both sides of the pond. He found creative ways to cut expenses, including sailing such well-built ships that he did not feel the need to buy insurance. Eventually, the government-subsidized companies could not compete. Their mismanagement was revealed and they went bankrupt. Folsom states, "In the steamship industry, political entrepreneurship often led to price-fixing, technological stagnation, and the bribing of competitors and politicians. The market entrepreneurs were the innovators and rate-cutters." (p. 15) Federal aid appeared to be a curse. 

He then moves onto the railroad industry. All schoolchildren learn about the glorious Transcontinental Railroad built by the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific. What they do not learn is that it was a government-financed boondoggle. In fact, Folsom tells the story of James J. Hill who built another transcontinental railroad completely free of government money, that operated both efficiently and profitably. Instead of rushing and acting inefficiently in order to get the job done quickly and maximize government funding, Hill took his time, carefully studied the path of the tracks and used high-quality materials. Therefore his train ran a shorter distance with greater dependability for less money. Folsom calls the Union Pacific's eventual bankruptcy all but foreordained. "The aid bred inefficiency; the inefficiency created consumer wrath; the consumer wrath led to government regulation; and the regulation closed the UP's options and helped lead to bankruptcy." (p. 22) With his profits flowing in, Hill began buying up failed, subsidized railroads and making them profitable. Hill built slowly, developing the areas around his railroad in order to promote exports that he could ship. He even opened up trade to the Orient. Unfortunately he was caught in the morass of legislation and laws meant to protect the nation from unscrupulous, subsidized businesses. His very successful, self-built company was declared a monopoly and ordered disbanded. 

Of course, the railroads could not function without a cheap supply of iron. This is where the Scrantons come in. Looking to produce iron, William Henry joined with his relatives, the Scrantons, and purchased land in northeast Pennsylvania. They faced fierce pushback from the local iron manufacturers and unforeseen poor land conditions. They quickly began to fail. Desperate, they tapped all their friends and family for funds to continue operations. They made the very risky decision to challenge the English and enter into the rail market. Undercutting the British, they got a contract almost impossible for them to fulfill, yet fulfill it they did. However, they knew that in order to continue to succeed, they would have to build up the local infrastructure to make it more amenable to transporting raw and finished materials. In the barren wilderness, they single-handedly developed the town of Scranton. The phenomenal growth of the town attracted other entrepreneurs like the five-and-dime Woolworth's stores. Interestingly, Folsom details the stories of the children of the original entrepreneurs. Some did well with the resources handed to them, but many did not. He makes the case that entrepreneurial spirit is not necessarily in the genes. Wealth does not always follow the families bequeathed it. 

Although I know of him in the context of financial investing, apparently Charles Schwab made his fortune in the steel industry. To demonstrate his ingenuity, Folsom tells of a story of an under-performing steel mill. After asking what had been done to motivate the workers and hearing a recitation of various threats, coaxing, and pushing, Schwab asks how many "heats" had been produced that day. After hearing that six had, he simply took some chalk and wrote the number 6 on the floor. When he returned days later, he saw the 6 crossed out and replaced with a 7, and then a 10. He had, in his own unique way, motivated the men and instilled the spirit of competition. 

Schwab worked for Andrew Carnegie. He worked tirelessly to make the factories more efficient and earned bonuses and promotions as a result. Unfortunately he did not imitate Carnegie's pension for clean living. Scandal eventually forced him to resign from U.S. Steel. While president of U.S. Steel, he had purchased Bethlehem Steel for his own portfolio. It was to this venture that he turned at his lowest point. This tiny company may have seemed like a radical demotion, but Schwab was determined to turn it around and make it competitive. Schwab even took on his old company and challenged the giant U.S. Steel. His attitude was, "If we are going to go bust, we will go bust big." (p. 73) He was eventually able to make a very profitable company out of Bethlehem Steel. But later in life, he ran out of steam. Once again ignoring the example of Carnegie, he went back to his profligate ways. The man who could single-handedly, through dint of his own hard work and motivational skills, make two companies very successful, died deeply in debt. 

John D. Rockefeller rose to the ranks of the fabulously wealthy in the field of oil production. He came from very humble beginnings but showed entrepreneurial promise early on. He was fascinated with the burgeoning oil industry and the ability to produce kerosene from crude oil, but right away, he noticed the appalling waste and fluctuating prices due to overproduction. He and a partner opened an oil refinery and determined to produce the best kerosene at the lowest price, while finding profitable uses for the myriad byproducts, which others threw into the river. Eventually, he decided to take on the Russians, who had all the natural advantages. He beat them at their own game by being more efficient. Although he was shrewd in business, he was quiet man, who "displayed none of the tantrums of a Vanderbilt or a Hill, and none of the flamboyance of a Schwab." (p. 93) His humility impressed all who knew him. Rockefeller was a devoted Christian and family man, who always put God and family before career. He donated tremendous sums of money and still managed to wind up with $900 million. 

The final biography Folsom turns to is that of Andrew Mellon. He was a Secretary of the Treasury of whom it was said that 4 Presidents served under. He had the revolutionary idea that too-high taxes would actually reduce revenue. He had made his money in the aluminum industry. His business skills brought him to the attention of President Harding. When asked to serve as Secretary of the Treasury, Mellon took a tremendous pay cut and accepted the challenge of turning around a post-war stagnant economy. Mellon believed that both the rich and the poor were being overtaxed. He saw first-hand that the wealthy were likely to shield their wealth in tax-exempt accounts rather than use it for investment in the economy. He despaired of this misallocation of resources. He advocated for the slashing of taxes, and true to his theories, revenues increased as more available money grew the economy. 

Mellon's program had four components: 1. Cut taxes to 25%, the maximum he felt the wealthy would pay before they shielded their money. 2. Cut taxes on low incomes, especially the regressive excise taxes on products. 3. Reduce the federal estate tax in order to discourage the sheltering of wealth in tax-exempt foundations. 4. Introduce efficiency into the government, cutting staff and expenses. He faced stiff opposition from the Progressives who wanted more, not less, government spending and higher taxes on the rich. Mellon's plan worked exactly as he predicted. More tax revenue came from the rich, with lower tax rates, and the lower income people had relief as well. Unfortunately, Mellon's legacy has been repeatedly described as tax cuts for the rich at the expense of the poor. This is the moniker the Progressives had hung on him during his lifetime and it stuck. It's unfortunate because Mellon is someone we could all learn from.

Folsom concludes by stating that the lessons of history will not be learned if we fail to understand what actually happened. Time and again, we see government subsidies retarding a company, leading to waste, fraud, and abuse, and the entrepreneurs that eschewed government handouts succeeding through bare-knuckled efficiency, which always benefited the consumer. History likes to portray these market entrepreneurs as "Robber Barons." Of this history, Folsom points out, "We did have the industrialists, such as Jay Gould and Henry Villard, who mulcted government money, erected shoddy enterprises, and ran them into the ground. What is missing are the builders who took the risks, overcame strong foreign competition, and pushed American industries to places of world leadership." (p. 127) Folsom celebrates these men in a way the history books do not. The "market entrepreneurs made decisive and unique contributions to American economic development. The political entrepreneurs stifled productivity (through monopolies and pools), corrupted business and politics, and dulled America's competitive edge." (p. 132) It is unfortunate that they are all lumped together. 

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes

The title of my latest reads intrigued me greatly: The Wealth and Poverty of Nations; Why some are so rich and some so poor. That’s a good question that David S. Landes asks. He does a very in depth job of researching how and why some nations succeeded and some failed. But in all his rich historical data, it was easy to miss a unifying theme. I tried to tease one out however. 

He begins with the reason why it is important to know what exactly contributes to a prosperous or poor nation. “Our task (the rich countries), in our own interest as well as theirs, is to help the poor become healthier and wealthier. If we do not, they will seek to take what they cannot make; and if they cannot earn by exporting commodities, they will export people. In short, wealth is an irresistible magnet; and poverty is a potentially raging contaminant: it cannot be segregated, and our peace and prosperity depend in the long run on the well-being of others.”

He begins with “Nature’s Inequalities” and discusses the role that geography plays in the success of a nation. He states, regular access to fresh water and temperate weather played a huge role in the early success of civilizations. “Life in poor climes, then, is precarious, depressed, brutish. The mistakes of man, however well intentioned, aggravate the cruelties of nature.” The patterns created by the well-suited geography led early people groups to form social and political organizations to help regulate the society. 

In the west, the notions of economic development and property rights began to develop. Part of this was due to the influence of Christianity. This belief system did not hold rulers to be gods, who could squeeze the people for more and more and take whatever they wanted. They believed everything belonged to the Lord, and we are His stewards. This transformed the economic development in Europe. In addition, the middle ages saw power decentralized in Europe. Unlike China, which considered itself the center of the universe, Europe offered somewhere else to go if one was unhappy with the current situation. The fall of Rome’s centralized authority led to decentralization and competition between areas that paradoxically added to the power of the overall supreme. The king knew that free people made the aristocracy less powerful and therefore less able to challenge his authority. And the free movement of people and goods led to higher tax revenues. In places like China which did not have free farmers but peasants under the control of a particular lord, the sense of rights and contract, to negotiate as well as petition, did not develop. 

Europe's decentralization proved a plus. Landes states, “In those middle years between ancient and modern, fragmentation was the strongest brake on willful, oppressive behavior. Political rivalry and the right of exit made all the difference.” In addition, within Europe the fragmentation created by the Protestant Reformation led to greater freedom of thought as compared to those areas under the dominion of a more controlling Catholic church. Yet even the more Catholic southern Europe suffered nothing like the thought-crushing Islamic countries. Even China, with no established faith, had a morality and belief system rigorously enforced by the mandarin class with no threats to the status quo allowed. In addition, the fragmentation made it difficult for the entire society to fall victim to a group of interlopers. An invading force would have to defeat myriad small kingdoms to gain a large territorial victory. 

As to the early success of Europe, Landes says, “The economic expansion of medieval Europe was thus promoted by a succession of organizational innovations and adaptations, most of them initiated from below and diffused by example. The rulers, even local seigneurs, scrambled to keep pace, to show themselves hospitable to make labor available, to attract enterprise and the revenues it generated.” The division of labor and widening of the market led to “one of the most inventive societies that history had known.” Some examples of technological innovations that Europeans, while not necessarily inventing them, exploited them like no other societies, were the water wheel to produce power, the eyeglasses, the clock, and printing. Many other places, like Islamic regimes or China, feared these developments as a threat to the stability of their societies and tried to shut them out rather than exploit them. Better to protect their power and religious interpretations if they could maintain the status quo than risk losing everything to an innovative and productive people. Once again, the Judeo-Christian character of Europe helps explain the difference. It promoted the value of work, believed in the subordination of nature to man, had a sense of linear time and progress, and promoted the basic equality of man to achieve and work to better himself. 

These western innovations eventually led to better weapons and transportation. This led, as it inevitably does, to expansion at the expense of the native inhabitants. Portugal led the way. Although China had some of the same advantages, they “lacked range, focus, and above all, curiosity.” They believed they were the center of the universe and had no need of outside goods or ideas. They disdained foreigners as inherently inferior. Why would they want to trade with or learn from them? 

Unfortunately this desire for expansion eventually led to the Atlantic slave trade. But this led in part to the Industrial Revolution as Europe sought to make products to trade. Landes believes the Industrial Revolution would have occurred without the slave trade, but it definitely helped fuel it. The Industrial Revolution then fueled a global search for markets, leading to empire building. 

We see that countries that industrialized quickly became more prosperous than those who resisted. This began a growing gap between the economic haves and have nots. “Paradox: the Industrial Revolution brought the world closer together, made it smaller and more homogenous. But the same revolution fragmented the globe by strangling winners and losers. It begat multiple worlds.” Even the apparent “winners” like the wealthy Spain and Portugal, wasted their wealth fighting wars. It was an industrial use of capital the spurned the economic growth of nations, not just the existence of wealth. Nations like Britain did not have the windfall gains made by early empire pioneers like Spain. Instead, they had to develop the habits of hard and innovative work. Additionally, some of the early economic players of Europe, like the Italians, were caught in a web of old structures like guilds, that suppressed innovation. Remarkably, Islamic and Chinese societies actively suppressed intellectual and technological advances. Whereas places like England were experiencing a “buildup — the accumulation of knowledge and knowhow; and breakthrough — reaching and passing thresholds.” Fame and a growing body of knowledge and technology spurred scientist to continue to push boundaries. 

Once again the Catholic/Protestant differences rise up. Landes quotes Max Weber’s thesis that the Protestantism of northern Europe created capitalism “by defining and sanctioning an ethic of everyday behavior that conduced to business success.” The doctrine of predestination led people to want to prove they were chosen by their moral and ethical work habits. Even after the belief in predestination faded, the habits remained. The Protestant Reformation also changed the rules for knowledge dissemination. Previously areas like Italy were great centers of the latest and greatest thinking. But then the Protestant Reformation came along and provided “a big boost to literacy, spawned dissents and heresies, and promoted the skepticism and refusal of authority that is at the heart of scientific endeavor. The Catholic countries, instead of meeting the challenge, responded by closure and censure.”

As the European empires began to grow, those founded by Catholic nations suffered from this insularity. They “did their best to close themselves off from foreign and heretical influences.” Dangerous new ideas and free thought were discouraged. This led to intolerance, superstition, and ignorance which continues to contribute the backwardness of some areas today. “The religious persecutions of old — the massacres, hunts, expulsions, forced conversions, and the self-imposed intellectual closure — proved to be a kind of original sin. Their effects would not wear off until the twentieth century… and not always even then.”

This Catholic/Protestant division led the Protestant Dutch to try to outcompete their erstwhile Catholic Spanish overlords. But the Dutch, where the Protestant Reformation flourished, valued tolerance and free thought. This upstart group of disparate provinces was able to challenge the very wealthy Spanish empire because the most innovative, free thinking, and freedom loving people fled from the tyrannical Spanish into the waiting arms of the Dutch. 

Britain soon followed the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch in empire building. They rapidly moved into India to create a colony there, which humiliated the resident Muslim rulers. Because Islamic fiefdoms operated fundamentally differently from the European system, the local rulers of India did not create the same barrier to entry as they did in Europe. In Europe, the local lords formed a largely hereditary system where they came to be intimately connected to the land and the people and competed with one another for free citizens. But in Islamic rule, the local lords were often randomly moved to prevent just such a possible threat to the Sultan. This led to a weakness the British were able to exploit. In fact, Landes makes the case that India was always going to fall to someone. It had been conquered multiple times throughout its history and never had a strong sense of nationalism to cohere it together in order to repel invaders. 

Eventually Britain moved well beyond its competitors. But why Britain? “By the early eighteenth century, Britain was well ahead — in cottage manufacture, seedbed of growth; in recourse to fossil fuel; in the technology of those crucial branches that would make the core of the Industrial Revolution: textiles, iron, energy and power. To these should be added the efficiency of British commercial agriculture and transport.” Britain, more than any others, was an ideal society to produce industrial, economic growth. He delineates 5 characteristics of an ideal foundation: “[The society] 1. Knew how to cooperate, manage, and build the instruments of production… 2. Was able to impart this knowledge and know-how to the young… 3. Chose people for jobs by competence and relative merit; promoted and demoted on the basis of performance. 4. Afforded opportunity to individual or collective enterprise; encouraged initiative, competition, and emulations. 5. Allowed people to enjoy and employ the fruits of their labor and enterprise.” This also implied gender equality, no irrelevant discrimination, a preference for scientific rationality over superstition, secure property rights, secure liberty rights, enforced rights of contract, stable government, responsive government, honest government, and a moderate, efficient, ungreedy government. In addition, there must be a sense of nation, “a self-aware idea characterized by common identity and loyalty and by equality of civil status.” There’s the formula for economic growth. Unfortunately, this has defined very few countries throughout history. 

This kind of readiness for industrial growth largely existed in northwest Europe and rapidly declined as one moves southeast on the map. While leftist political economists and economic historians like to blame poverty on the exploitation by richer nations, that is not the correct explanation. “Europe’s development gradient ran from west to east and north to south, from educated to illiterate populations, from representative to despotic institutions, from equality to hierarchy, and so on. It was not resources or money that made the difference; nor mistreatment by outsiders. It was what lay inside — culture, values, initiative. These peoples came to have freedom enough. They just didn’t know what to do with it.” He further states, “It is not want of money that holds back development. The biggest impediment is social, cultural, and technological unreadiness — want of knowledge and knowhow. In other words, want of the ability to use money.”

This explains most of the world. What then, explains America? “America’s society of smallholders and relative well-paid workers was seedbed of democracy and enterprise. Equality bred self-esteem, ambition, a readiness to enter and compete in the marketplace, a spirit of individualism and contentiousness.” America started with a tabula rusa and an optimistic open culture. Because Americans did not have to overcome a fossilized culture, all the fundamentals for success were already in place from the beginning. “The decisive and most distinctive American innovation, though was not any particular device, however important, but a mode of production — what came to be called the American system of manufactures.” Europeans eventually fell behind because the “found it harder than Americans to accept the ruthless logic of productivity.” America began to set the standard for productivity and ruthlessly pushed for more, faster, and cheaper. 

Landes then looks at why South America and Asia, specifically China, lagged so far behind. South America fell because of the same things that held southeastern Europe back. China suffered from “cultural triumphalism combined with petty downward tyranny [which] made China a reluctant improver and a bad learner.” 

He also spends time discussing Japan. Unlike China, they were learners. While initially open to trade and Christianity, this very traditional society began to feel threatened when the newly converted seemed to owe more allegiance to God than to their emperor. So like China, they shut down and turned inward. In a reactionary vein so common around the world, they wanted to “freeze the social order, fix relations of social and political hierarchy, prevent disagreement and conflict.” Eventually they saw how far they were falling behind the rest of the industrial world and made an incredibly valiant effort to catch up. Eventually they put their European and American competitors to shame. They were exemplars of the catch-up model, proving that sometimes, it pays to be late.

He looks at what ails the Islamic regions of the world. It starts with the dysfunctional Ottoman Empire. “The Ottomans had originally filled a power vacuum — they had taken over a region once strong, now enfeebled — looting as they went. Now they could no longer take from outside. They had to generate wealth from within, to promote productive investment. Instead, they resorted to habit and tried to pillage the interior, to squeeze their own subjects. Nothing, not even the wealth of high officials, was secure. Nothing could be more self-destructive.” Today the heirs of the Ottoman Empire, the Islamic countries “are without exception despotisms, where leaders are not responsible, actions are unpredictable, loyalty is a ruse or a mirage of propaganda, and everything, including the economy, is subordinated to politics and can be turned around by an event. Instead of courting legitimacy by appeals to material improvement — have I made you better off? — Arab leaders have boasted of victories over colonialism or Zionism and waved the bloody shirt of jihad, promising to put history right….[Arabs] had more pressing things to do — first of all, to defeat Israel. Prosperity could follow.” Which is to say, prosperity never.

Today, we see, what Landes calls, the losers. The Middle East is a failure. “Its political, social, and cultural institutions do not ensure security of enterprise or promote autonomous technological development. Also, cultural attitudes, and above all, gender biases, inhibit industrial undertakings.” “Most Latin nations have resorted to the manipulation of trade and money: import barriers and quotas, differential rates of exchange, a carapace of restrictions that some have called the ‘inward-looking model’ — and, of course, to borrowing.” These measures exact a heavy price. “Among the heaviest losers in this period of record-breaking economic growth and technological advance were the countries of the Communist-Socialist bloc… The striking feature of these command economies was the contradiction between system and pretensions on the one hand, performance on the other… The joke had it, they made believe they worked, and the state made believe it paid…” “All the ills that have hurt Latin America and the Middle East are exponentially compounded in sub-Saharan Africa: bad government, unexpected sovereignty, backward technology, inadequate education, bad climate, incompetent if not dishonest advice, poverty, hunger, disease, overpopulation — a plague of plagues.” Until these areas develop the cultural attitudes that lead to prosperity, they are bound to fall further behind. No amount of western meddling can pull a society out of its self-imposed limitations. 

Going forward, Landes states, “Until very recently, over the thousand and more years of this process that most people look upon as progress, the key factor — the driving force — has been Western Civilization and its dissemination: the knowledge, the techniques, the political and social ideologies, for better or worse.” “If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference.” Yet here we are, by far the most successful economy on the planet throughout all of history and our colleges and universities are working feverishly to destroy all that that prosperity is based on. Pick a place where Western Civilization has not invaded, Somalia, Pakistan, and figure out which one we should become, because that is life apart from Christianity and Western Civ. 

Who's the Fairest of Them All by Stephen Moore

President Obama is constantly pressing for “fairness.” At least his definition of the word, which generally means take from the rich and give to the poor. O.K. So he wants to help the poor and he’s obsessed with fairness. He should read Who’s the Fairest of them All? by Stephen Moore. 

He begins the book with, “The left argues that conservatives don’t care about poor people, and this is why they oppose income redistribution in tax policy, welfare payments to the poor, higher budgets for social programs, regulations like higher minimum wages, and so on. But the premise of this book is that it is equally (maybe even more) plausible to say that liberals don’t care about poor people.”

He then goes on to state with vivid clarity the myriad ways the left have hurt those they claim to care the most about. The programs and policies have led to rising poverty, higher unemployment, dismal education, and increasing fatherlessness. This from the friends of poor. With friends like these...

With charts and graphs and an array of statistics, Moore makes the case that in the most economically free nations the poor are always better off. “So in other words, if we judge society by how well it serves the poor, then free enterprise is far and away the greatest anti-poverty program known to man.” 

The most fair society is the most free. By clamping down on our freedoms and attacking free-enterprise, those on the left have doomed the poor to poverty, never to rise out. 

Here's a video which illustrates the principles (quite literally!)

Wealth and Poverty by George Gilder

I am on a George Gilder kick, so I had to read his most well-known book, Wealth and Poverty. He does not disappoint. Gilder makes the MORAL argument for capitalism. He states in the very beginning, “No nation can grow and adapt to change except to the extent that it is capitalistic, except to the extent, in other words, that its productive wealth is diversely controlled and can be freely risked in new causes, flexibly applied to new purposes, steadily transformed into new shapes and systems.”

He starts with the axiom that another’s fortune is ultimately everyone’s fortune. This idea does not arise naturally in man, but his book sets out to prove it. Because capitalism depends on a mutually beneficial transaction, one cannot benefit without another benefitting as well. Therefore, the success of capitalism begins with the desire to please another. It begins with giving. A man gives his time, his sweat, his ingenuity, his resources, hoping his risk will lead to another finding the resultant product desirable and therefore, he himself will ultimately benefit as well. The man invests in the future and the unknown for future gains. The collectivist remains mired in the past and “certainty.”

The nature of wealth is largely misunderstood. Wealth is not dollars or money, but is “assets that promise a future stream of income.” Money can be and is squandered with nothing to show for it. Wealth accumulates and promises future returns. This is why, usually in America, the rich themselves do not get richer. Rather someone willing to take a risk and bet on the future will pass the already rich in wealth. This leads to the false illusion that the already rich getting richer. Rather, those with ingenuity and the ability to create wealth surpass the already rich. True wealth resides in an adaptable, compelling, and flexible mind. But a capable and innovative mind often needs money invested in his ideas. This is the role of the already rich, who can only consume so much. They invest in the up-and-comers.

The nature of poverty is also misunderstood. Gilder states, “every successful ethnic group in our history rose up by working harder than other classes, in low-paid jobs, with a vanguard of men in entrepreneurial roles. But the current poor, so it is supposed, can leapfrog drudgery by education and credentials, or be led as a group from poverty, perhaps by welfare mothers trained for government jobs. These views depict the current poor as a race so alien to the entire American experience, so radically different in motive and character from whites, that one can speak in terms of a new form of bigotry.” Although he pulls back from actually calling liberals racist, he points out that they do have a different set of rules for how they see non-whites. But the truth is, whether white or black, “the ONLY dependable route from poverty is always work, family, and faith.”

In fact, what we often perceive as racism is actually a class clash. Many upper class people are reluctant to expose their children to lower-classes and their values. Because it is values that are the only way out of poverty, it is harmful to the poor to accept and pander to them, thus assigning “them to permanent poverty.” In pursuing egalitarianism programs like welfare, we promote the very things that destroy the work ethic, family connections, and faith necessary to escape poverty. Yet, some prefer keep alive the myth of racism as an explanation for poverty in order to stay in power.

Gilder believes, “There is something, evidently, in the human mind, even when carefully honed at Oxford or the Sorbonne, that hesitates to believe in capitalism: in the enriching mysteries of inequality, the inexhaustible mines of the division of labor, the multiplying miracles of market economics, the compounding gains from trade and property. It is far easier to see the masters of these works as evil, to hunt them as witches, favored by occult powers or Faustian links.” And this is why there is a never-ending, sometimes bloody, war on wealth. 

This war leads to liberal policies that hurt far more than they help. They create “moral hazard” which encourages the opposite behavior of what is desired. Unemployment insurance promotes unemployment, AFDC promotes fatherless families, Social Security discourages concern for the elderly and breaks generational links. In depriving poor families of the incentives necessary to promote wealth, we create people whose “response to this reality is that very combination of resignation and rage, escapism and violence, short horizons and promiscuous sexuality that characterizes everywhere the life of the poor.” The are not reflecting their economic conditions, but rather responding to liberal policies and incentives in a rational manner. Men in these circumstances have no reason to delay children and family until after they have faithfully gained the work ethic to support them. They have every financial incentive not to. Until we make work, family, and faith more rewarding than the dole, welfare and poverty will continue to explode.

Other pernicious idea also continue to keep lower classes from rising. We have focused too much on “discrimination” as a cause and have resorted to credentialing to combat it. Credentialing keeps competitors out of the labor market and therefore hurts the most vulnerable. We raise the minimum wage and keep huge segments of the labor market from finding a job. The high unemployment rate of young, black males bears out this truth. We task the government with “creating jobs” with make work programs that are often demoralizing and counter productive.

Often, we hear, “Tax the rich” as a way to take care of the poor. Here we see an especially negative effect. Taxing the rich will not affect their consumption. The truly rich actually consume very little of their wealth. Most invest the vast majority of it. Taxes come out of their investments, not their consumption. In fact, high taxes actually encourage consumption. After all, if the government is going to take it anyways, why not enjoy it and blow it on luxuries instead? In addition, the Laffer curve has shown that high taxes result in less monies collected overall. So the “Tax the rich” mantra is another liberal policy doing the opposite of what it purports to do.

To achieve a prosperous society, we must have a forward-looking economy of faith. “Socialist and totalitarian governments are doomed to support the past. Because creativity is unpredictable, it is also uncontrollable. If the politicians want to have central planning and command, they cannot have dynamism and life.” Creative dynamism, necessary to the health and wealth of a society, frightens those with a fear of the unknown. Risk cannot be negated in ever-changing growing economy. Government regulation agencies can only live in the past. Every new, unknown, unproven idea is discarded and unworkable when the rules of the past are applied to it. It’s why we don’t have the long-promised hovercrafts! How can that kind of innovation escape the myriad rules governing transportation?

“Liberals want wealth without the rich. Yet most real wealth originates in individual minds in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways. A successful economy depends on the proliferation of the rich, on creating a large class of risk-taking men who are willing to shun the easy channels of a comfortable life in order to create new enterprise, win huge profits, and invest them again.” Danger and uncertainty, risk, waste and inefficiency are the engines of prosperity and success. These very necessary elements to the human condition are what the liberals want to deny, suppress and plan away. They operate with jealousy and covetousness and want to take the wealth from the rich for their own purposes. 

He ends with, “At any time in human history, a rational calculus of our possibilities would lead to a prediction of doom. But over the millennia, the race has flourished. It has thrived, however, chiefly on one condition, on a cluster of conditions, combining faith and freedom with risk and work. It is chiefly when we give up on chance and providence, when we attempt to calculate and control our own destinies through ever greater regulation by a demiurgic state, that disaster occurs.”

Human creativity, unleashed, and in relationship with God, promoting the Biblical values of Charity, Faith, and Hope, is the greatest resource we have to achieve true prosperity for all. 

Left Turn by Tim Groseclose

The mainstream media is biased to the left. This is not shocking or even an especially new revelation. Yet Professor Tim Groseclose of UCLA has gone even further and done an extensive, peer-reviewed and verified study proving the extent of the bias and more importantly, the effect. His book Left Turn is a must read for anyone who doubts the veracity of the claim.

The first part of the book details his credentials and methodology. He make a compelling case for his research and five years in, has yet to sustain a serious critique. His particular study gave politicians a Political Quotient, PQ, which rates them from 0 - 100 with 100 being the most liberal. They range from Jim DeMint with a 4.8 to Nancy Pelosi with a 100. Some even extend beyond in either direction. Then he rates media outlets based on how often they cite conservative or liberal think tanks for their experts and facts and gives them a Slant Quotient (SQ). In this way, the New York Times (74) can be directly compared to the liberal slant of Joe Lieberman (74.7). After surveying 20 news outlets, he found an average bias of over 58. 

He compared his study to another that used a different methodology. That study compared certain phrases which tended to be used by conservatives to phrases which are associated with liberal groups. The two studies complemented and reinforced each other. 

Finally, at the behest of some coworkers, he decided to try a much narrower study. He found that in the debate over the Bush tax cuts, some of the facts supported the liberal position and some the conservative. He studied news outlets for which set of facts they emphasized. Just as in the other two studies, he found a strong liberal bias.

However, he was stuck with the question of Does it matter? Does the bias actually change political behavior? He began with the opinion that it did not. He believed enough people knew their source of news carried a liberal bias and discounted it.

Yet some studies piqued his interest. One involved studying markets into which Fox News entered and comparing before and after political behavior. The study found Republicans experienced a .43 percent uptick. The other study involved dividing 600 people into two random groups and sending one The Washington Times and the other The Post. After being exposed to the liberal and conservative leaning papers, the authors found a 3.8 percent impact. Finally one study on game theory showed that even when the subject KNEW they were being manipulated, they still failed to figure out the truth and offered an opinion closer to the one desired. 

These, combined with anecdotal evidence suggested that media bias did indeed have an effect. But how much? Again, after going deep into his methodology, he arrives at what he believes is a low estimate of 70%. In other words, our political opinions are guided 30% by what we would naturally believe and 70% based on the news bias. 

This is HUGE. In fact, he convincingly postulates that without media bias, if Americans were left to make up their own minds, the nation would have a PQ of approximately 25! We would rate between Ron Paul (31) and Jack Kemp (20) as a nation. Unbelievable. The whole country would look like Kansas (24) or Texas (27). Republicans would add 8 - 10 points in national elections. 

I can’t get into all the specifics of his methodology. Suffice it to say it is clear and convincing and frustrating. To know that our country could rise like a Phoenix and regain our exceptionalism if only people were not manipulated by the media is such a tantalizing possibility. Yet, we are manipulated. Daily. 

He ends with a plea for journalists (whom he lost respect for in the course of the study) to become more like politicians (whom he gained respect for). He begs journalists to spend time in a city or area with a PQ of 25. Get to know those religious people who own guns and cry at the Star Spangled Banner. We exist. We are not the stuff of mythology and backwater hell holes. In addition, the media should discover their own personal PQs and advertise it. We know where every politician stands on the issues when they declare their positions and party affiliations. We should expect no less of those that give us the facts we need to be an informed citizenry. 

Sigh. I wish. They never will. Why would they? Their carefully preserved and created mythologies would crumble and liberalism would die on the vine. 

*Prager University has a video on this*

No, They Can't by John Stossel

John Stossel wrote, No They Can’t: Why Government Fails -- but Individuals Succeed, to point out the many, many things government has had a hand in and ultimately made worse. It is not simply that the government SHOULDN’T be doing these things, it’s that they CAN’T do these things. Simply put, the government should not be doing what an individual can do for himself. The individual may succeed, but the government can ONLY fail.

He works through issue after issue in each chapter. He highlights the various contrasts between what “intuition” tempts us to believe and what reality has taught him. 

The first and most basic is that while we are tempted to believe that our country and economy needs a plan and the smart planners know best, hard reality teaches that no one knows enough to plan a society. 

The fact is, that our society is complicated and there is not a single person or group of people who can have enough knowledge to adequately plan out the lives of 330 MILLION people. The combined knowledge of the people is staggering, but above that, even the 330 MILLION people don’t have all knowledge. Even they don’t know what the future holds. Yet our president and congress pretend to be experts on housing, autos, energy, education, transportation, commerce, military, healthcare, banking, securities, labor, agriculture, trade, urban development, veterans, justice, treasury, and the environment. 

This is like hiring a guy to fix your car, repair your roof, be your dentist, deliver your child, provide security, landscape your house, teach you French, educate your children, cook for you, choose your clothing, and find you a spouse. No one person could or even should do all that. We would naturally find someone who is good at just one of those things and hire a different person for each chore. But the government believes it can tell you how many miles per gallon a car should get and what light bulb to use. It believes it can plan your diet and your healthcare. It believes it can predict future discoveries and get Wall Street to stop being greedy. What arrogance! What a recipe for disaster. 

The first thing the government tinkers with and therefore destroys is the economy. Only free markets with private individuals can get an economy moving. Governments tip the scales, distort the incentives, and because of its huge size, generally muck it all up. 

Government tries to “level the playing field” and make life fair. The only way to make life more fair is through totalitarianism, that is inherently unfair. Not only that, they only succeed in making everyone more poor and destroying resources. Instead of some being well-off, no one is well-off. 

It would seem to make sense that businesses need government regulation to curb their propensity for excess. Yet only consumers can provide the level of accountability that businesses need. In fact, when a corporation is protected from customers ire, think Post Office, the waste and abuse grow rather than diminish. 

Some believe that workers are treated best when in government protected unions. Yet experience has proven that a union/government partnering is worse for everyone, even the union workers. Businesses that must attract and retain employees in a free-market treat their workers better than those stuck with protected union members. In fact, because of the special protection certain people and classes enjoy, they become less employable. 

Since healthcare costs a lot, many are tempted to involve the government to contain costs. The reality is that when government becomes involved, the cost skyrockets. Innovation is stifled, resources are misallocated, accountability is lost, the public suffers. 

Life is risky. Shouldn’t government try to lower the risks we face? It can’t. In fact, the government policies can add a new level of risk. Those “gun-free” zones... risky. Rescuing people who make bad decisions again and again... risky. Protection from unproven medical devices... risky to those who desperately need the innovation. Making sure no one is offended and therefore implementing speech codes... risky to the 1st Amendment. We can and should evaluate risk for ourselves, and pay the consequences for our decisions. 

Education is too important to leave to individuals. The government surely must have a hand in teaching our children. Education is too important to leave to the government. The individual MUST be in control of the education of his children. Government- run schools combine the worst results of government-run anything. Union teacher, no financial accountability, no consumer feedback, a level “playing field” which only makes everyone equally bad off, no innovation, no risk, no positive outcome. Only concerned parents should be making education decisions for their children. 

While government has screwed up everything else it has tried to manipulate, surely government should regulate drugs... nope. While drugs kill and disable, the WAR on drugs has killed and disabled many more people. This is a classic case of the treatment being worse than the disease. 

Government must protect the environment or greedy corporations will destroy it. Once again, wrong. The best way to protect... anything... is ownership. People protect what they own. No one ends up protecting what no one owns. The free market is the best protector of the environment. Only the free market can distribute scarce resources efficiently. 

The government believes it can balance its budget with the proper mix of taxes and spending targets. Once again, wrong. Taxes can NEVER bring in enough to satisfy the voracious government. Politicians will NEVER cut spending, if it will cost them a vote. Only a radical limit to how much the government can take in and what areas of society they are allowed to tinker in will ever make a dent in our budgetary issues. 

But SURELY the government must be involved in the military affairs. Yes, this is actually one area in which the government must play a role. The idea of each individual hiring his own private military is simply unworkable. BUT, even in this area, the same principles that make government a dismal failure in every other area, make the government particularly inefficient in this area. Because the sums of money involved are huge, the potential for waste and abuse increases astronomically. Even, and especially, here, when it comes to our military, we must be vigilant in holding our government accountable for its overextension. 

In conclusion, Stossel states, “There ought NOT to be a law.” We cannot create a utopia of good and virtuous people living in comfort and ease with any law. In fact the more laws, the further society gets from that ideal. Only individuals, working in their own best interest can create a society worthy of them. The government only gets in the way.