All of this helps us understand how the spoils system became rampant in the nineteenth century. The resources required to win a nationwide presidential election were too massive for parties to raise on their own, and so they turned to
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“It was perhaps John Maynard Keynes who said it best, in the closing chapter of The General Theory: the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than commonly
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“The fact that this book was originally written with only the British public in mind does not appear to have seriously affected its intelligibility for the American reader. But there is one point of phraseology which I ought to explain
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For Madison, the ultimate goal of the new government was to balance different factions and produce public policy that was only in the public interest; for Hamilton, the goal was a vigorous government to spur the country on to national
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“Be it enough to mention that in 1934 the newly established National Planning Board devoted a good deal of attention to the example of planning provided by these four countries: Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan. Ten years later we had
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From an historical view- oil was once greeted as environmentally friendly fuel- it eliminated the need to hunt whales for fuel and reduced the smell and health issue of horse feces in Manhattan. Coal kept us from destroying timber assets,
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Kevin Williams in National Review, A Shocking Number: Fifty years into the Democrats’ declaration of a war on poverty and President Kennedy’s first executive order for affirmative action, while spending $300 million a year onworthless diversity workshops and singing endless verses
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We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution
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Thomas Sargent gives an interesting perspective in An American History Lesson for Europe, in the Wall Street Journal 2/3/12. Excerpt: To finance canals and railroads, many state governments incurred large debts in the 1820s and 1830s. A financial crisis in
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Thomas Sowell writes Best Way to Aid Economy? Just Do Nothing in the Investors Business Daily, 9/14/11. Excerpts: The grand myth that’s been taught to whole generations is that the government is “forced” to intervene when there is a downturn
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“These are times in which genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life or in the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed
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When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America in the early 19th century in his classicDemocracy in America, he was comparing America’s democracy to the declining norm in Europe: aristocracy. The European aristocracy, a landed aristocracy, ruled with inheritance and privilege.
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“Once cherished, history is currently viewed as onerous- unless employed for social engineering. The results are political leaders who cannot weigh the consequences of their actions; journalists who confuse the exciting with the significant; military officers who view their profession
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“The citizens of the United States do not stand apart from history. We are in it and of it. Many of our ancestors came here hoping to escape it, but history is a pack of bloodhounds. Desperate to put those
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“Abraham Mordecai-who, believing that the Indians were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. threw off the “yoke” of Jewish law, went native, and married an Indian girl- was actually the founding father of Montgomery, Alabama, cradle city of
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from Paul Johnson “The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many
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In A Short History of Financial Euphoria(1993), J. K. Galbraith takes a brief look at financial bubbles and draws conclusion about the similarities among them. The most remarkable of the early manias was not in stocks, but in tulip bulbs. The
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Thomas Paine’s ” Common Sense” was credited with turning colonial independence from a debate into a movement. His widely published essay is considered an important document toward the founding of our nation. Less noted is Paine’s “The Age of Reason”
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Obama has posed this question and seems to think we can. William Dudley the new president of the New York Federal Reserve thinks they can and should act to identify and prevent asset- price bubbles. I remain very skeptical. The
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I finally got around to reading history professor Michael Neiberg’s (my nephew) book on WWI, ‘Fighting the Great War’ and became fascinated by the incredible carnage compared to previous and subsequent wars. I have now finished Jeff Shaara’s WWI novel
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