Comments | peake: Depression

peake

Depression

Feb 12, 2011 09:35

I am currently reading what may be the most depressing book I have read for a long time, The Thirties by Juliet Gardiner. Depressing not because of what is in there, though the stories about the effects of unemployment and poor housing and so forth are just terrible. No, this is depressing because I could be reading about the present ( Read more... )

Comments 12

fjm February 12 2011, 09:42:24 UTC

Herbert Hoover. The entire charitable sector in the USA collapsed in 1930. Furthermore, when the Government did take over, it discovered that you couldn't trust charities not to concentrate funds on their own preferred groups: after all, Blacks were *used* to being poor, so they didn't need extra help did they?

Being a historian is not a good thing right now. I got so depressed at the news of job losses in Brum yesterday--home of municipal socialism--that I called E to have a good cry.

del_c February 12 2011, 16:15:40 UTC

We have seen tax-and-tax spend-and-spend reach a fantastic total greater than in all the previous 170 years of our Republic.

Behind this plush curtain of tax and spend, three sinister spooks or ghosts are mixing poison for the American people. They are the shades of Mussolini, with his bureaucratic fascism; of Karl Marx, and his socialism; and of Lord Keynes, with his perpetual government spending, deficits, and inflation. And we added a new ideology of our own. That is government give-away programs....

If you want to see pure socialism mixed with give-away programs, take a look at socialized medicine.
Herbert Hoover in 1952, at the Republican National Convention, as Robert Reich reminded us yesterday in "Who Says Republicans Have No New Ideas?".

fjm February 12 2011, 16:38:47 UTC

Oooh, well done! I hadn't seen that quote. I'd have thought he'd have learned something.

autopope February 12 2011, 09:58:21 UTC

Cameron is apparently so ignorant of even recent history that he reportedly believes that Thatcher didn't do a U-turn over the imposition of monetarism in 1981 -- that the tenuous recovery of the mid-late 80s was due to her policies, not in spite of them.

It is to weep.

kalimac February 12 2011, 16:11:51 UTC

Thatcher said so memorably that she wasn't turning, that people believe her.

It's the same thing over here with Reagan and shrinking government/reducing taxes.

la_marquise_de_ February 12 2011, 10:05:21 UTC

It doesn't effect *them*. And that's the only bit they really register.

bibliofile February 12 2011, 20:39:19 UTC

This. Reality doesn't interfere with their precious ideas, so the ideas MUST be good. Right?

Ugh.

swisstone February 12 2011, 11:07:17 UTC

I am coming to the conclusion that, for all that the Thatcher and Major cabinets pursued reprehensible policies, they were not utterly stupid. This lot are.

martyn44 February 12 2011, 11:32:35 UTC

Interesting to see Suede Shoe Ken in the news today telling us to bend over, touch our toes and enjoy the thrashing that's coming because it will do us good. Wasn't he supposed to be the human face of Thatcherism, permanent place at Ronnie Scott's and all that jazz? Bourbon seems an appropriate comment, remembering everything and learning nothing.