Category Archives: History

The Great Depression

The media continues to peddle BS history about it (unfortunately, because it was what they were taught in government schools).

It was sad to see Emily Compagno the other day on The Five say that FDR was elected to deal with Hoover’s “inaction.” So even conservatives believe this nonsense.

Hoover’s policies were disastrous, but they were the very opposite of inaction, and he was the furthest thing from laissez faire. If Coolidge had had a third term, likely the economy would have recovered within a year. Hoover created the depressions, but FDR made it great.

[Update a few minutes later]

Our garbage media.

[Update a while later]

A review of Amity Schlaes’s new book on how poverty won the war on poverty, including some of the history of the Depression.

[Late-morning update]

In reading that history, I had not known that Walter Reuther had sponsored the Port Huron Statement (I lived sixty miles west, in Flint) at the time. It reminded me of a post I wrote early in my blogging career, almost two decades ago now (where did the years go?) about my brief period as a junior-high campus radical.

Space Resources Update

An article on the legal state of asteroid mining. This isn’t true, though: “Much like the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the United States has not signed the Moon Agreement but by custom it adheres to the treaty — at least until Donald Trump’s recent executive order, which explicitly rejects the idea that such agreements are binding to the USA.”

Meanwhile, Michael Listner writes that we must return to the moon to preserve the rule of law in space. Well, that’s certainly a reason, but not the only (or even best) one.