Comments on: Harry Truman: Advancing the Revolution

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 20:05:08 +0000

@Billwald,
Come clean, you are really Michael?

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 20:04:06 +0000

Look up Pareto.

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 20:03:01 +0000

What we got after World War 2 was the United States with their infrastructure in place and the rest of Europe and Asia in tatters. Now let’s see how we might have had a leg up on the rest of the world.

By: ivan

ivan — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 12:22:07 +0000

I shall definitely NOT buy the book. To my great surprise, the Mises Institute, published a review of a book of a Soviet apologist. Apart from the overall tone, it has very many factually incorrect statements, too many to mention.
Overall, a lot of rubbish.

By: Wyne

Wyne — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 12:21:15 +0000

MINI CANVAS transform photos into works of art by printing them onto high quality real fibre artist cotton canvas prints.

By: RTB

RTB — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 03:10:19 +0000

By the way, I love that 80/20 figure you keep using. It’s a common phrase to describe a lot of different things. Where are the numbers to back it up in all the places you use it? I can divide anything up at 80/20 and use it. What does it really mean? Are you referring to income here? I’m sure I’m not in the top 20% of annual income earners, but live quite comfortably. And I know most of those in the top 20% work quite hard, indeed. Much harder than most who whine and complain and are only looking for something for nothing. I don’t envy those who make more money than me. I am thankful for them. It is their efforts that make my comfortable living possible.

Thank you “20%”.

By: Ohhh Henry

Ohhh Henry — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 21:16:13 +0000

billwald, would you please look up the many articles at mises.org and elsewhere on the non-stimulus of the Marshall Plan (it was a racket to subsidize a handful of politically connected American companies and a scam to give cash to the CIA, and it did nothing for the economies of either the USA or the target countries) and the non-depression that followed WWII (thanks to cutbacks in government spending and repeal of New Deal regulation).

You think that the coincidence of a large middle class and a big government means that big government created the middle class? Get real. The existence of all that wealth in hands of the middle class is what caused the thieves and murderers to invent big government, in order to steal the wealth.

By: Ken Zahringer

Ken Zahringer — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 20:36:37 +0000

And of course that depression (if in fact it regularly occurred, which is debatable) has nothing to do with the distortion in the structure of production from the years of military production, right? And it only takes a sufficient quantity of funny money to straighten things out, too. And that pre-WW2 norm thing – you’re not referring to the Great Depression are you? Hoo, boy.

By: billwald

billwald — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 19:04:57 +0000

After most every major war there is a recession (depression) when the troops come home. Thanks to the Marshall Plan and the GI Bill we got a large middle class instead of a depression. The present economic mess – we are returning to the pre-WW2 norm of 80% working poor and unemployed poor.

By: Ohhh Henry

Ohhh Henry — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 15:15:35 +0000

In the following decades, the CIA was to play a sinister, extremely expensive, and often comically inept role — especially in its continually absurd overestimations of Soviet strength.

I doubt that “inept” is the right word. It sounds like they provided exactly the correct intelligence [sic] that was required in order for the domestic police and military state to expand.

Likewise the bombing of the Chinese embassy in 1999 was unlikely to have been accidental. More likely it was meant as a warning shot and/or the destruction of some kind of a facility that was assisting the Yugoslav military and collecting data on US bombing capability.

I’m forming a new theory of war – all wars are in essence wars by governments against their own people. Whenever peacetime expansion of state power is stymied, war is introduced as a kind of stick with which to beat the populace into accepting further intrusions.

If you consider the resistance and momentum which is preventing the US government from imposing full-blown Obamacare, VAT, carbon taxes and a new service draft, you can see that a war is just what they need. I think that there will be some combination of a hot war with Iran plus a cold war with China, and “police actions” to quell civil wars in the disintegrating Eurozone.