I continue to be amazed at the number of parallels between the FDR administration and the Obama administration. There were two important ones from this weeks reading that I wanted to spend time covering. Causes of the Great Depression During the 1930′s and into today capitalism is often pointed out as the reason for the Great Depression. FDR campaigned saying that the rich were getting | Read More »
This is the first entry for our new book in the Book Notes section of Red State. I decided to go with New Deal or Raw Deal: How FDR’s Economic Legacy has Damaged America by Burton Folsom, Jr. because it seems very relevant for today. President Obama came into office on a spending spree. The Democratic controlled Congress and Senate showed no desire to reign | Read More »
Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater turned out to be a very good book wrapped in a small package. Many of the sections touched on some of the themes we have seen through out the Book Notes reading. Others brought new ideas out. The section on foreign aid has me reconsidering my entire position on foreign aid. It never dawned on me (though it | Read More »
I continue to be amazed at how much relevance the books from this project have in today’s world. Free to Choose was written in the 1970′s. Yet much the book, and much of what we have covered here, could easily apply to today. One of the interesting points in this last section was the inclusion of the Socialist Party Platform of 1928. The Milton’s write | Read More »
In this weeks reading the Friedman’s spend a lot of time comparing the government’s efforts at protecting the environment. They look at the FDA, the Consumer Products Safety Commission, and finally the EPA. For this weeks book notes, I want to focus in their comments regarding the EPA. The point of the book notes project is to learn from previous thinkers lessons that may apply | Read More »
Chapter 7 is entitled “Who Protects the Consumer?” Most of the quotes below are drawn from the second and third page of this section. I thought it was so insightful that I highlighted it, and read it to my wife. If you have a high school student in your house, you should have them read this part. This section begins with the Friedman’s acknowledging that | Read More »
The title for Chapter 5 of Free To Choose is “created equal”, and is taken from the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” What does “created equal” mean? The Friedmans would answer, “The clue to what Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries meant by equal is in the next phrase of the Declaration — ‘endowed by | Read More »
Shortly after reading the section discussing social security in Free to Choose, I had a discussion about the dangers and misnomers of Social Security with a friend. Since this is an example of something we were reading translating directly into water cooler talk, I thought it was a good subject for this post. The Friedmans do a very good job of pointing out that Social | Read More »
Though the United States has not adopted central economic planning, we have gone very far in the past fifty years in expanding the role of government in the economy. That intervention has been costly in economic terms. The limitations imposed on our economic freedom threaten to bring two centuries of economic progress to an end. Intervention has also been costly in political terms. It has | Read More »
This week we begin our reading of Milton and Rose Friedman’s Free to Choose. I found so much in the first chapter that I wanted to discuss, I could probably write a post a day for the next week. In this chapter, the Friedman’s spend a lot of time discussing the role of prices. Prices serve three functions: transmit information, provide an incentive, and distribute | Read More »
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