Jamie Galbraith explains his interesting life

Watching the career path of James Galbraith has been a minor hobby of mine ever since I discovered that my interest in economics was directly related to how many of his father's books I had read. The fascination with whatever Galbraith's economics was called was based in my mind on the fact that papa John Kenneth (Ken) Galbraith grew up on a working farm in Ontario and entered the economics profession through the door of agricultural economics. He gave speeches for the Farm Bureau when starting out.

I believed this was important because:

1. I trust the intellectual habits and practices of those really smart farm kids. Farming is an Ur profession. Providing for the community’s nourishment is a LOT harder than it looks. It is the basis of civilization itself. Out of this scramble came the people who literally built the country. And they created social structures as enlightened as any in human history.
2. Yea, for the home team. While I envied the childhood of James and wished I could have sat in a corner as JKG discussed the affairs of the world with the best educated economic minds of his generation, I could not. Northwest North Dakota is a LONG way from Harvard. What I could do, however, was recreate the education the farm kid from Ontario got watching his parents and neighbors as they sought to invent a way to get farming to pay the bills out at the thin edge of civilization. Products of this struggle have a reality base that informs the rest of their thoughts. Done right, the resulting thinking can be quite spectacular.

And so, while I avidly read JKG’s books and articles and tried very hard to emulate his thought processes, I was really interested in Jamie’s life because, after all, he is only three years younger than I. If the economics that JKG and friends had been perfecting since the earliest days of Roosevelt’s New Deal was to survive, the next generation of economists would have to learn the institutional practices that actually pushed forward the project of eliminating grinding poverty while attempting to overcome the Great Depression. It is not beyond reasonable speculation that JKG would want at least one of his sons to follow in his intellectual footsteps. And so Jamie would become the crown prince of JKG’s explanations for how the American Industrial System actually worked.

If you read James’ memoir below, you will see that he got a training that was the product of JKGs best ideas. Harvard AND Yale. Professors with international reputations and probably a friend of the family. A “visiting scholar” appointment at Brookings when it was still relevant. And finally he wound up at University of Texas—Austin. This school had enthusiastically embraced all the neoliberal rationalizations in its school of economics so of course, young Jamie would not be welcomed there. However, UT-Austin had long been home to the best Institutionalists in the land led by the spectacular Clarence Ayres. Their wisdom was no longer welcome in the economics department either but they knew a fellow creature of the New Deal so gave him the job of Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.


The career contrasts between JKG and James are extremely interesting. JKG was by the end of the 1960s arguably the most famous face the economics profession would ever have. His books were read in dozens of countries. He wrote for Henry Luce’s Fortune magazine. He taught at Harvard and had acolytes all over the world. His 10-part video series on economics called The Age of Uncertainty (some episodes can be found on YouTube) was co-produced by the CBC, BBC and PBS. His breed of economic thought was accepted as the rational middle because the practitioners had done a mostly excellent job of running things—post-WW II reconstruction being the best example.

By comparison, James had a modest career that was useful. The man did not waste his life. But he was not the titan like his father—mostly because he had about 1/100 the opportunities to do a good job. In my humble opinion, the factor that explains this most simply was the change in zeitgeist. The economic theories of JKG had ceased to be cool. Where I come from, the enlightened, passionate Keynesians who had run the economics department at the University of Minnesota since the glory days of Alvin Hansen in the 1920s had long since forgotten the reason why Hansen was so enthusiastic about activist government economic intervention. Where he came from (Viborg South Dakota) such economic policy was literally a matter of life and death. This passion also informed JKG.

But Jamie did not grow up on a working farm, he grew up in a splendid home large enough to entertain a steady stream of guests eager to swap ideas with the leading light of what was coming to be called Keynesianism. Jamie's childhood economic demonstrations taught him that economics was this delightfully difficult problem to be solved, not a dangerous test against arctic-like winters and you must be clever enough to still have food in the spring.

Jamie's also suffered wrong intellectual turns even (or especially) considering his gee-whiz educational paths. Economics was changing through the addition of computing power. The math geeks would pose the big questions for the high-powered mainframes to crunch and suddenly, the great mysteries would be revealed through the statistical wisdom of regression analysis. Analysis as modeling guided by machine-perfect math sure sounds like a good idea.

Personally, I was not impressed. I wasted much of my youth building model airplanes and learned a profound lesson. The reason that model airplanes don't look or fly like real airplanes is that all sorts of problems are introduced when you try to scale the outcome. There are guys who want their scale models so authentic, they even want the rivets in the right place. Unfortunately, if the rivets get too small, they no longer can work as fasteners so they are reduced to decoration. Worse, there are physics problems that cause small airplanes to fly differently than large planes. For example, the governing bodies who make the rules for judging scale models have modified those rules so that models are still considered authentic even if the tail surfaces are oversized. Why? Because a WW II fighter with accurately-sized tail surfaces will barely fly—if at all. Oh those Reynolds numbers.

Then there are the problems of predicting behavior using mathematical formulas. Try, for example, to animate the walking behavior of a small toddler in a 3D animation. Using math formulas to predict such random behavior is virtually impossible. In fact, realistic cartoon behavior is really only possible if one puts markers on a real child, let him walk across the floor, take those marker locations and attach them to the model and animate the result. And yet, there are economists from around the world who actually believe they can predict large-scale human motion like market behavior with a few elegant math formulas. I am reminded of that arrogance when I watch just how difficult it is to make a self-driving car. And this is an EASY problem. There are states in USA that issue driver's licenses to 15-year olds.

When Jamie Galbraith lists the learning experiences that were mostly a waste of time he includes learning matrix algebra. (See paragraph #4 below.) So essentially he learned the same lessons as I only in a Harvard classroom. Unfortunately, this mislearning sunk the whole econ profession for at least 50 years. Worse, because this mislearning was so difficult and time consuming, other necessary things had to be dropped. The most serious is the fact that one can now get an advanced degree in economics without knowing the history of the subject. It's no wonder that economists have gotten almost everything wrong for the past 50 years.

So here's to James K. Galbraith who devoted his life to recreating the methods employed by the economists who guided the industrialized west to the greatest prosperity in human history. Historians are important too.

Oil bites back

Well, the laws of oilfield "gravity" are finally kicking back in. They are:

1. In spite of small motor-efficiency gains, the demand for oil continues to soar. Those people in China and India who finally got a nice car are not about to park it in the front yard and look at it.
2. It has been a long time since the discovery of a major oil field. At some point, maybe soon, demand will significantly outstrip supplies. The scramble will be on.
3. Fracking was a diversion. It cannot succeed because the energy gathered through fracking barely exceeds the energy it takes to frack. It's not easy to rearrange underground rock formations.
4. The sanctions on Iran may prove a significant boost to their national prospects. Keep it in the ground. By the time sanctions are lifted, the price of oil may have doubled or more. In real economic terms, the price of oil can only go up.

The position of USA is very precarious. For over a generation, this nation has waged war on the middle-east oil nations. Spilled a LOT of blood in the process. Mostly to prove that oil was forever. Well, it's NOT. And the people who can control the global production of oil come from places where people seethe with anger at the very mention of our name. No one owes us any favors. And even with fracking, we are still net importers of petroleum products.

Now IF we had put this problem—one that was already well-defined by 1973—on a WWII footing as Jimmy Carter suggested when when he called the energy problem "the Moral Equivalent Of War," the coming events would be so much easier to manage. Instead, official Washington took to calling his quite reasonable suggestion MEOW. Oh Jimmuh! you were such a pussy. Carter discovered that rational argumentation just wasn't butch enough.

Thoughts on the trials of Elon Musk

These days, the most uplifting story concerns the Tesla automotive project. I find it interesting because I have been something of a car nut since grade school. Our next-door neighbor was the local Ford dealer just when Edsel Ford decided to make his company dominant in racing. This was a no-holds-barred land-based space race—the first use of aluminum honeycomb outside of NASA went into Ford's LeMans enduro racers. My neighbor, who was mostly selling trucks and tractors to his farmer customers, would give me the chest-pounding literature of Ford Racing because he found it irrelevant to his business. Then I added to that knowledge base in college working for an auto parts store where I first became aware of the incredible size and complexity of the USA on wheels.

My initial reaction to Musk entering that world was, "Elon baby. Stick to software. Cars are an amazingly difficult and expensive proposition. This a world that eats upstart competition for breakfast." And yet, Tesla still stands as an ongoing concern and its most recent brush with death—the mass production of an affordable EV—seems to be most significant for how much money the "shorts" lost the other day. So what have we learned?

1) There seems to be sufficient expertise in bleeding-edge production techniques so that an upstart can be world-class on its first try. I was pretty sure this could not be done but it was. Tesla has some amazing millwrights.

2) Building electric cars apparently is a lot harder that it looks. The Model S has now been out for 7 years and there is still no realistic competition. Those who were warning, "just wait until Volkswagen (Toyota, the Koreans, etc.) gets serious about EVs, then Musk will fail" have been given a pretty strong demonstration that it was easier for Tesla to solve its production problems than for traditional car makers to overcome their own internal bias towards continuing to make what they already make.

3) Tesla is proving that the switch to EVs is a complex cultural change that relies on software development, direct to customer retailing, and supercharging networks as much as innovative production expertise. The legacy car makers are notoriously deficient in these areas. On the other hand, Tesla's leads on this cultural arena are still quite susceptible to technological diffusion (what they know will soon be common knowledge.)

In other words, stay tuned.

(update 9 AUG 2018)

The shitstorm that Musk created by announcing his desire to take Tesla private is a sight to behold. Musk is hardly the first high-end Producer Class figure to discover that the world of finance is filled with bloodthirsty Predators who do NOT have his, or his company's best interests in mind. To them, he is a cipher whose only interest to them is how much money does he have to rip off.

Here in Minnesota, we had a guy named William Norris who ran a significant computer company called Control Data. During the 60s and 70s, he would get into constant fights with the shareholders. Trust me, Musk is hardly the first to notice that shareholders often get in the way of successful business operations. In fact, Henry Ford once replied to questions about taking Ford public, I would rather take down Rouge brick by brick with my bare hands than let a gang of speculators get their hands on Ford Motor. (or similar) In fact, old Henry had been dead for 9 years before Ford finally went public.

I see the shorts are threatening to sue.

On Class and Climate Change

In 1899, Thorstein Veblen would publish perhaps the most interesting, and misunderstood, book ever. It was called The Theory of the Leisure Class. Many, perhaps most, of the readers of this scintillating tome consider it a wonderful work of satire that highlights the foibles of the idle rich, and those who would emulate their lifestyles. And while I would agree that many parts of Veblen’s analysis are screamingly funny, we miss the point if we assume that Veblen was merely trying to entertain. Because beneath the chuckles, there is a deadly serious class analysis that goes a very long way towards explaining why a problem like climate change doesn’t get treated as seriously as it should be.

In Veblen’s world, there are two basic classes. The Industrial Class organizes the community’s necessary work. The Leisure Classes fasten themselves on the backs of the industrial classes “through force and fraud” in the often successful attempt at getting something for nothing. The Marxists then ask, “Aren’t your industrial classes merely another name for the proletariat?” This is important—the answer is NO.

Back in the day when Marxists preached that they were the friends, advocates, and only true representatives of the Proletariat, there was always something demeaning in their analysis. When someone picks strawberries all day in the hot sun, the Marxist description of the Proletariat and their troubles is still surprisingly accurate. But what do you call an farmer with 2500 acres under cultivation, or an engineer, or a big building contractor, or any number of important and often high paying occupations? They are obviously Industrial Class jobs but they all come with very different problems than face someone doing stoop labor. Obviously, there is an incredible amount of stratification within the occupations that can be found under the heading of “organizing and performing the community’s necessary tasks.”

Just as the Industrial Classes are stratified, so are the Leisure Classes. There is a large gap in income and status between a pickpocket and a hedge fund manager. But while there are hundreds of differences between the two major classes, many quite profound, the most telling is that when the Leisure Classes engage in conspicuous consumption and waste, their highest calling is uselessness. On the other hand, the goal of the Industrial Class is to be useful.

This class analysis is almost universally despised by the academic idea police. The right wing hates it because so many of their elites are little more than well-dressed thieves. The “left” (especially the Marxist varieties) hates it because it opens the possibility that there are enlightened, imaginative, and quite necessary “capitalists.” But it continues to be relevant because it describes the existing social order so much better than probably all the competing class descriptions combined.

Hard times coming?

For those of us who believe that energy is a primary need for survival, the collapse of oil prices since 2014 was quite frankly, surreal. How can a globe with a billion light vehicles not continue to need petroleum? The demands for liquid fuels are embedded in the design of our societies. Most people, unfortunately, view the oil giants as these powerful people who can get wars started to defend their interests. Up close, the people who actually get the gasoline to the neighborhood filling station see themselves in a mad, scary scramble to meet this insatiable demand—a demand that will not go away any time soon.

Of course, supply and demand do not always determine price. Lots of crazy stuff happens in the commodity markets so we can have low oil prices while global demand goes up. And high oil prices do not necessarily shrink demand—demand is built in, remember. Yes folks can cut out frivolous consumption but the rest of the demand is considered "inelastic." So high energy prices mostly damage the other folks trading in things that are considered less necessary than energy. So at some time, one of the primary economic laws will kick in—hello $6 a gallon gasoline. And if you run an restaurant, for example, be prepared for fewer customers with less money to spend.

Below is a YouTube of someone who was in charge of getting the crude that the majors convert to the fuels we need. Spent around 40 years at it. His explanation of the supply problem is clear and probably quite accurate.

Looking at America

When I first saw Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth I had two quite powerful reactions. I loved the excellent first half where he explained the science of climate change. The second half, where he attempts to describe what actions should be taken to mitigate the problem, was just plain awful. I spent much of that time asking rhetorically, "Al, did you really watch the first half of your own movie? Do you REALLY believe you can prevent the ice caps from melting by talking people into hanging their wash out to dry?"

Since then, I have concentrated my efforts on the problem "What can we do to address climate change effectively?" The way I see it, there are at least 50,000 highly qualified scientists working diligently on the science of climate change but almost no one is giving serious consideration to what sort of actions are required to build a society that does not destroy the atmosphere. The reasons for this are complex but they must include examinations of the sociology, economics, engineering, and other social interactions that make it extremely difficult for populations to actually reduce the amounts of greenhouse gasses they generate. So while the climate scientists keep coming up with frightening warnings about what will happen if nothing changes, nothing changes. In fact, the situation continues to worsen.

So when I decided to address climate change, I was determined to concentrate on the solution end of the problem. Spoiler alert—this is a lot harder than it looks. There are excellent reasons why the best minds on the planet go scurrying for cover whenever the talk turns to remediation. But did this stop me? No-o-o-o! And quite honestly, the effort exhausted me.

I have a friend who has been doing video documentaries since the 1970s. One of his core beliefs is that nothing attracts or holds attention like pictures of big equipment doing big jobs. When the subject is the massive amounts of carbon we are pumping into the atmosphere, big equipment is just everywhere. After awhile, these pictures—especially the ones showing the Germans strip-mining brown coal—triggered near clinical depression. Here is Germany—arguably the finest example of "green" technologies in action—mining 170 million tons of the dirtiest fuel in 2017 because it is their only fuel source still cheaper than solar.

Staggered by my renewed exposure to the vast, complex, and necessary machinery that produces CO2 in the course of normal operations, I added to my woes by exploring the increasing evidence that there is already so much in the atmosphere that even significant reductions in output wouldn't actually help all that much. For these folks, it's already too late.

And then the weather got very strange. By now, there has probably been more snow in Minneapolis to set new all-time records. Turns out that the same kink in the Jet Stream that almost eliminated winter in Alaska was bringing misery to the lower 48 including 4 Nor'easters in three weeks to New England and points south.

Of course, the government was doing nothing. Trump is struggling to form a government and the Democrats, saddled with an acute case of Trump derangement syndrome, have busied themselves with restarting the Cold War because it is easier to blame Russia for their political woes than to examine the dozens of perfectly valid reasons why they lost the election of 2016.

So I decided to take a road trip to escape the crazy winter and to celebrate the progress I did make on my climate change video. I had few plans but I wanted to see Tony in North Carolina and visit my brother in Florida. By the time I reached Illinois, I had named it my "Chill Out and Lighten Up" tour. Things were going as planned when my fuel pump took a dump just outside of Dayton Ohio—at 3:00 on a Sunday morning. By the time I got back on the road on Monday afternoon, I had managed to blow a $1000 hole in my travel budget.

My stay in Xenia Ohio was an eye-opener. There were no cabs to transport me from my cheap hotel to the shop where my car was to be fixed so I entered the world of Uber. Trust me, no one goes into private transportation unless other better forms of employment have dried up. I said to one driver, "Dayton was a famous and important town while I was growing up. How's it doing now?" I got an earful of the tale of Dayton's deindustrialization. I knew enough about Ohio's role in supplying parts for the auto industry so I took a shot, "Did you even lose Delco (the folks that manufactured the electronic parts for GM)?" He looked like someone who had just lost a child. Tony would later explain that Delco stood for Dayton Electronic Corporation and had been in the GM family from almost the beginning. I didn't know.

Tony was getting ready for the big model engineering show in Detroit. His business has taken a hit in the last few years—probably because the sort of people who make complicated things for fun are dying out. He keeps plugging away and has made significant progress on his book How America was Built. Mebane North Carolina was once the home to runaway textile manufacturing from New England. In the past couple of decades, they kept on running to places like Bangladesh and Vietnam. Developers have turned some of the old mills into housing but the original housing stock for the textile workers was very modest. On the other hand, I visited a niece whose husband is an engineer for AT&T. They live close to the research triangle near Raleigh. That neighborhood had some very nice housing.

The drive to central Florida went off without a hitch. My brother's splendid net-zero house is more wonderful than I had expected. In some ways it is like a hippie's dream house except everything works and was carefully and lovingly crafted. The Orlando area, OTOH, is an environmental nightmare—2.4+ million permanent residents and 51 million visitors per year. With no visible signs of central planning, it is a city built by real estate developers who think nothing of putting up 2000 homes on a two lane road with the hope the infrastructure will catch up. Traffic is a nightmare. On his side of town they have opened 3 large high schools in 12 years. Downtown Orlando is a forest of tower cranes. And in all that building in the center of the Sunshine State, there are probably less than 500 solar homes.

My recovery from near exhaustion goes slowly. This little thing took five days to write and I have left out a lot. My brother's house is very impressive and because he built it himself cost less than $150,000 including solar panels when they were still pretty spendy. So in theory, the solar future shouldn't be so difficult or expensive. But watching him in action explains why so little progress gets made—he is very organized, clever, and understands the market for the components of such a complex house. The typical lefty who is confused by any tool more complicated than a fork couldn't build such a dwelling in a hundred years and would still spend bucketloads of money in the process.

Hope to get back to fixing my video soon. Wish me well.

HAWB 1816-1834 - West Point Foundry and Steam Power for the Navy

How America Was Built

HAWB 1816-1834 - West Point Foundry and Steam Power for the Navy

The following is an excerpt from my book Admiral Benjamin Franklin Isherwood and the Scientific Study of Steam Power (which will hopefully be published later this year), detailing how the U.S. government helped create a private enterprise in 1816, how that enterprise became a leading center of metal working and steam engine building, and how 18 years later the national government turned to that company to help the Navy adopt the new technology of steam propulsion. This is not the mythical laissez faire, "free market" capitalism that supposedly built the United States. It is a deliberate policy of nation building, originated by first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, and carried out by his successors. 

By the early 1830s, there were some people beginning to worry about the more rapid development of naval steam power in Britain, but not much was done. Some Navy Secretaries briefly summarized known developments in the Royal Navy their annual reports, but Congress was not inclined to act on the matter.[1] Things began to change in July 1834, when U.S. Senator from New Jersey Mahlon Dickerson was appointed Secretary of the Navy. Dickerson had been chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce and Manufactures for the 16th through 18th Congresses and the Senate Committee on Manufactures from the 19th through 22nd Congresses, and no doubt was familiar with the state of steam engine design and manufacture in the country. The Board of Navy Commissioners was already in contact with engine builders, and was trying to obtain plans from the West Point Foundry.[2] In June 1835, President Andrew Jackson ordered Navy Secretary Dickerson to direct the Board of Naval Commissioners to actually begin building a steam battery. This would become the 181-foot, 1,200-ton Fulton II, based on Humphreys’ plans of 1831, with an additional 41 feet of length.


But the Navy had not a single officer or sailor with a solid knowledge of the design and operation of steam engines.... by the end of the year the Board was forced to admit it simply did not have the knowledge and expertise to carry it into effect. In a remarkable letter to Secretary Dickerson, dated December 30, 1835, the Commissioners frankly confessed “their ignorance upon the subject of steam engines” and doubted they would be able to even provide “necessary information to enable persons to make proper offers” to design and build the engines. “They [the Commissioners] are satisfied that they are incompetent themselves, and have no person under their direction who could furnish them with the necessary information to form a contract for steam engines that may secure the United States from imposition, disappointment, and loss…”[3]

Fully aware that they lacked the expertise to make any decisions regarding procurement of steam engines, the Board of Commissioners, requested assistance from Gouverneur Kemble, president of the West Point Foundry, at the time perhaps the largest iron foundry and engine builder in the country. The West Point Foundry was established in 1816 at one of four strategic locations selected by Secretary of War James Monroe and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander J. Dallas for the construction of iron foundries to produce cannon and shot for the Army and Navy. It was located in Cold Spring, New York, on the Hudson River opposite West Point. (The other foundry sites were Georgetown, D.C., Richmond, Va., and Pittsburgh, Penn.) To begin construction, $25,000 in direct funding was given to Gouverneur Kemble, a New York businessman “who had served Commodore Stephen Decatur's fleet as an assistant navy agent in Cadiz, Spain during the Barbary War in 1814,” and who therefore was “no stranger to the Navy Department's method of procuring supplies or doing business.”[4] 

The foundry’s first engine for a steamboat was built in 1823 for the James Kent. It was a very successful design, securing the company a leading reputation for building engines and other machinery. Over the next two decades the foundry built engines for a number of other boats, including Victory (1827), DeWitt Clinton (1828), Erie (1832), Champlain (1832), Highlander (1835), Swallow (1836), Rochester (1836), Utica (1837), and Troy (1841).[5] Beginning in 1830, West Point Foundry built three of the first four steam railroad locomotives made in the United States. The first, Tom Thumb, was designed, built, and operated by Peter Cooper, and was only an experimental machine, intended not for revenue service, but to convince the directors of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad that steam was a viable source of power for railroads (it must be recalled that at the time, there were widespread doubts about the feasibility of applying power to iron wheels on iron rails, especially up a grade.) The next three locomotives built in the U.S. were all intended for revenue service, and all were built by the West Point Foundry: Best Friend of Charleston (1830), and West Point (1831), both for the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company, followed in 1831 by the DeWitt Clinton, for the Mohawk & Hudson Railway. These was followed a few years later by the locomotives Phoenix and Experiment, the last reportedly capable of reaching 80 miles per hour.[6]

It must be noted—especially now, when the economic role of government is under constant attack as dangerous “statism”—that the shift by a government-funded establishment into a leading role in new technologies was entirely in accord with the intent of first President George Washington, and his Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and their plans to have the new government actively foster and promote economic development. In his 1791 Report on Manufactures, Hamilton wrote:

To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted…. Experience teaches, that men are often so much governed by what they are accustomed to see and practise, that the simplest and most obvious improvements, in the most ordinary occupations, are adopted with hesitation, reluctance, and by slow gradations…. To produce the desirable changes as early as may be expedient may therefore require the incitement and patronage of government… it is of importance that the confidence of cautious, sagacious capitalists, both citizens and foreigners, should be excited. And to inspire this description of persons with confidence, it is essential that they should be made to see in any project which is new—and for that reason alone, if for no other, precarious—the prospect of such a degree of countenance and support from government, as may be capable of overcoming the obstacles inseparable from first experiments.[7]

When the Navy Board of Commissioners requested his assistance, Kemble in turn sought the advice of Robert L. Stevens, son of the builder of the first steam battery in 1814. He had helped his father design and build the steamboats Phoenix (1807) and Julianna (1811), and mastered them on the Delaware River, servicing Philadelphia. The Phoenix had been built in Hoboken, New Jersey, and her transit from thence to Philadelphia in June 1809 made her the first steamboat to sail the open ocean. Robert Stevens had also traveled to Britain to examine railroads and locomotives there, and had brought the locomotive John Bull to the U.S. in 1831 to operate on the Camden and Amboy Railroad, of which Stevens was president.

When Kemble’s brother, William—who was West Point Foundry’ agent in New York City and presumably was dealing with Stevens—sent drawings for engines to Navy Commissioner John Rodgers in January 1834, he included a note stating “Robert Stevens feels the engines above 30 inches cylinder should not be vertical due to wear in the underside and in vessels because of the length taken up by the engine.”[8]

The plans and accompanying explanations must have further perplexed the board. In June 1835, the Board requested it be allowed to again contact Stevens, plus others who had designed and commanded steam vessels. Secretary Dickerson readily agreed. Three board commissioners traveled to New York, and began gathering information. At some point, they concluded that the Navy simply needed to secure the services of someone with the training and skills required to supervise the acquisition and building of steam engines, and installing them in a hull. In July 1836, the Commissioners accepted the offer of Charles H. Haswell, a skilled worker at the West Point Foundry, to design a steam engine and supervise its construction. Haswell had been schooled in the classics, but in 1828, at the age of 19, he began working at the New York City engine works of James P. Allaire, one of the first major builders of steam engines and boilers in the United States. The brass hardware and fittings for the engine of Robert Fulton’s North River / Clermont were built by Allaire.

At first, Haswell was a temporary employee of the Navy Board of Commissioners, but it quickly became apparent that his lack of rank was a serious disadvantage in dealing with naval officers, so Haswell was given the official title of “Chief Engineer” of the Fulton II. This had little actual effect; obstruction and delays continued; and the steam battery was not ready for launch until May 1837.

With the hiring of Haswell, the virtuous economic circle designed by Alexander Hamilton was completed. The government had “cherished and stimulated the activity of the human mind,” and “multiplied the objects of enterprise,” and now was harvesting the wealth of mechanical knowledge which had thereby been promoted. The national government had provided direct funding for the creation of West Point Foundry, and within two decades it had become a center of the nation’s most advanced metalworking and machine-making capabilities. Now the government was reaching out to enlist the skills and capabilities of the Foundry to help the nation’s Navy transit into the modern era of mechanized power. 

[1] Sprout, Harold and Margaret, The Rise of American Naval Power, Princeton, NJ, 1966, Princeton University Press, pp. 112-113.

[2] Tomblin, Barbara, From Sail to Steam: The Development of Steam Technology in the United States Navy, 1838-1903 (unpublished History PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 1988, pp. 14-15.

[3] Bennett, Frank M., The Steam Navy of the United States; A History of the Growth of the Steam Vessel of War in the U.S. Navy, and of the Naval Engineer Corps, Press of W. T. Nicholson, Pittsburgh, Penn., 1896, p. 18.

[4] Tomblin, pp. 15-17.

[5] Buckman, David Lear, Old Steamboat Days on the Hudson River; tales and reminiscences of the stirring times that followed the introduction of steam navigation, New York, 1907, The Grafton Press, pp. 137-138.

[6] “Archaeological Research at West Point Foundry Preserve,” http://www.scenichudson.org/land_pres/wpfp_research.htm, accessed November 7, 2017.

[7] Hamilton, Alexander, Report on Manufactures, Communicated to the House of Representatives, December 5, 1791.

[8] Tomblin, p. 21.

Protectionism in the age of solar cells

The Trump administration has annouced its intention to slap some tariffs on products mostly coming from S. Korea and China. In certain corners of the economic world, this is a major story—mostly because it flies in the face of neoliberalism's first commandment—Thou shall not condone protectionism!

As two guys who are serious students of industrialization in general and USA industrialization in particular, Tony and I are pretty supportive of some sort of economic protectionism. Tony's approach is very straight-forward—he looks at the historical record and sees that every nation that successfully industrialized did it behind tariff walls.

My take is that because the financial markets are hopelessly corrupt, shortsighted, and technologically illiterate, they are unable to properly value the infrastructure of industrialization. When financialization first started, there were a few protests at the ability of real scoundrels to seize and then cash in on assets they rarely understood, who in the process of their plunder, squandered a system of wealth creation that had taken decades to create. They pissed away USA's industrial crown jewels for a tiny fraction of what they were worth with their get-rich-quick schemes. These protests probably crested with Oliver Stone's movie Wall Street—an effort so excellent, I suspect Stone didn't even know how good it was.

Along with the plunder came the justifications for why this did not matter. Around here, these loony economic expressions for how the world should work, but doesn't, are lumped under the garbage pile we call neoliberalism. And in the world of the neoliberals, there is no greater sin than "protectionism." Yet here we are with a president who believes that tariffs and such are probably a good thing. He's about 30 years too late, but he seems to think USA industry should be protected. One other thing, the Asians have been about as brazen in their theft of intellectual property as anyone—including USA from GB. The Chinese were caught red-handed dumping solar panels. The party injured by this was actually Germany but a couple of USA manufacturers won some settlement with the Chinese. Ironically, both USA victims are foreign-owned—one German, one Chinese.

I have included four essays on this subject after the break:

1. The Asians seem to think this is a major shift in USA trade policy. My guess is that they will figure out ways to adjust to new market realities.
2. Lindorff seems to think these tough new trade rules are a manifestation of an unhappy empire that wants to slap around China and Korea for the crime of wanting a different foreign policy than the folks from Foggy Bottom.
3. Reuters, which always believes protectionism is a bad thing, argues that tariffs on solar panels will most hurt the solar panel installers.
4. The folks at Rolling Stone just assume this is Trump's way of throwing some roadblocks in the way of new green technologies.

All of these folks have a point. And we will probably hear a lot more on this subject. This is a protectionist proposal in a neoliberal world—a world with thousand of economists well-trained and motivated towards shooting this thing down. As someone who participated in the debate over NAFTA, I am very interested to see how this debate will differ.

Can the American Left Be Resurrected?

The reputation of Garrison Keillor is beyond my power to attack or defend. Around here in Minnesota among a certain age group, he has been the culturally dominant figure of our lives. This is certainly true for me. I started listening to him back on the early 1970s and was immediately intrigued because of our shared backgrounds. We both went to the University of Minnesota as impoverished students. We both came from small towns. And we both had WAY too much religion in our childhoods. And these themes informed his worldview. Like a lot of smart kids from small towns, the surprise that never exhausted itself was that citizens of big cities were not automatically smarter or better-read or harder-working than we were. In fact, it was usually the opposite. And there are so many of us that we kept his show alive and well and his books on the best-seller lists for decades.

And yet, within the past few days, Keillor has been written out of our culture by some suits at Minnesota Public Radio for the "crime" of making a clumsy pass many years ago. They have pulled down his extensive catalog of shows from their website. Seriously? Political correctness has come to this?

Part of the problem is the Minnesota Inferiority Complex. (Minneapolis went through a stage where some marketing genius wanted to call their fair city the "Minne-Apple" like a junior version of New York—the Big Apple, get it? I am still embarrassed by how lame that was!) In this case, the state that never voted for Ronald Reagan still wants to be considered the cutting edge of Progressive thought. Politically, that impulse ended when Paul Wellstone died. We now have two doctrinaire neoliberal Senators (although who knows how the Al Franken fiasco will end.) So since Democratic Party activists have decided they won't contest the neoliberal agenda in economics or foreign policy, they will go all in on political correctness to the point where the mark of a gold-star liberal is to redefine a clumsy pass into harassment / rape.

For those poor souls lost in the wilderness of political correctness it is probably time to remind them of the basics of sound government.

1) Governments exist to organize collective action. There are projects that are too complex and expensive for even rich people to afford. From highways and bridges to interstate banking, some things just need collective action. If the people organizing this collective action understand that the goal is to enrich the whole and not some small group of backers, the first big step towards good government has been taken.

2) Honesty. This one is easy. It impossible to do great things with liars and corner-cutters making important decisions. This is ESPECIALLY true if we are ever to escape the energy trap that has caused the climate to change

3) Competence. In spite of what we may believe these days, political correctness is NOT a substitute for knowing what you are doing. It is impossible to make wise decisions on transit policy or land use or pollution control without a fundamental historical and technological literacy. I seriously believe we should have qualification tests in these areas before anyone is allowed close to a collective decision—and this applies to private real estate developers and charter schools as well as elected officials.

Putin's farmer

This is a story about a German farmer named Stefan Dürr who has taken his considerable skills to Russia where he has organized enough agriculture to have become one of Putin's goto guys on the subject. We last met Dürr in 2012 in a post on Catherine the Great and her policies that lured German farmers to Russia beginning in the 1760s. Apparently Putin believes that this was one of Catherine's better ideas (it was).

Well, now this story has not only made it to Deutsche Welle (an eminently establishment German broadcaster) but they have seen fit to post it to Youtube. The reason seems to be that because of Dürr and folks like him, Russia has not only weathered sanctions to their food supply, but they have upped their agricultural game to the point where she just had her best harvest IN HISTORY.

In other words, Russia is beginning to prosper because a former KGB agent has by plan, or sheer dumb luck, or some combination, executed a Producer Class economic maneuver of the first order. Import substitution is hard to do and yet they have done it. And it is all based on the recognition of the incredible value of German agricultural practice. Apparently, Putin learned a great deal while stationed in Dresden.

HAWB 1940s-1950s Timeline of computer development shows crucial role of government

HAWB - How America Was Built

Libertarians like to shout their belief that “the welfare state has created nothing.” I wonder if they think the welfare state was not the one in the 1930s through 1960s that funded the basic research, then specific research to create transistors, computers, and the internet. Perhaps they think NASA was somehow not part of the welfare state? Perhaps all the spin-offs of NASA--such as modern medical monitoring equipment--or the Apollo Guidance Computer, which drove forward the technological boundaries of integrated circuits and software development as well as computers in general--do not really exist because “the welfare state” could not possibly have created them? (The libertarian ideology apparently must be kept pure–shades of the doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist!) Perhaps all those spinoffs are just figments of the fevered imaginations of those terrible statists who want to “redistribute wealth”?

People like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Peter Thiel and every single other chest-pounding libertarian CEO of Silicon Valley (it is frankly disgusting that so many people in the industry given such support to organizations like the Reason Foundation) would have NOTHING, absolutely effing nothing, were it not for what the U.S. government did in the 1930s through 1960s that resulted in the creation of computers and the internet. These people owe everything they have to the United States of America. Without those government programs and that government support — and let's not forget the tens of thousands of kids that were educated at public land grand universities — there would be no computers, no software, no internet, no transistors, no semiconductors, no Silicon Valley, no Silicon Valley fortunes, no Microsoft, no Intel, no Apple, no PayPal, no Amazon.

TIMELINE of Government Support for the Development of Computers

October, 1919. The Army and the Navy granted RCA the former American Marconi radio terminals that had been confiscated during World War One. Admiral Bullard received a seat on the Board of Directors of RCA. The result was Federally-created monopolies in radio for GE and the Westinghouse Corporation and in telephone systems for the American Telephone & Telegraph Company. The following cooperation among RCA, General Electric, the United Fruit Company, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, and American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) brought about innovations in high-power radio technology, and also the founding of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) in the US.

Germany to Jump to Russia – U.S. Deep State has Lost

The latest rumblings from Berlin suggest that the SDP is going to cave, once again, and become the junior partner in Merkel's CDU-run government. This comes after the collapse of the so-called Jamaican coalition talks (CDU, Greens, and FDP.) You could smell that fiasco in the middle of North America. But that attempt comes after the SPD and CSU lost significant fractions of their vote in the last election and needed new blood. But Greens and FDP? That would be like Bernie Bros hooking up with the Koch brothers. (It seems to me that any coalition named for Jamaica should be negotiated to the sweets sounds of Bob Marley and good Ganja and the Krauts probably tried it with polka, bier, und schnapps.)

Of course, the interesting question is whether the German government will keep pursuing their hopelessly stupid neoliberal agenda because that is what the crooks at Deutsche Bank want, or will they begin catering to the industrial interests that really keep the economy going. (Producers vs Predators, ja) The problem with running a Producer agenda is that it is exactly what the EU and USA does not want.

My take is that while an economic realignment is seriously overdue, it will face major hurdles. The Neoliberals will not give up easily. On the other hand, there are elements in the German psychic that really like doing business in Russia and so this may lead to Germany abandoning sanctions. Luongo below has thoughts on this.

On Veblen and Puritanism

Well, folks, I keep trying. Someone whose stated qualifications for interest in Veblen was that he had been assigned to read The Theory of the Leisure Class in college, asked me to address his little group of the socially and politically interested called the Minnesota Branch of the Sons and Daughters of the Pilgrims (I am NOT making this up.) Apparently, to be a member one has to be able to trace his or her genetic roots to the Mayflower.

This didn't sound like a good match but I gave the prospective appearance a good faith effort. I drove the event coordinator around the Veblen house and Valley Grove cemetery for almost three hours. Because the meeting site had no AV equipment, I got real 8 x 10 color photos produced. He even informed me I had to wear a jacket and wonders, I found one in a dusty corner of my closet. By this time, I had invested so much time and energy that I arranged for a friend with a NICE camera to record my efforts—a move that was allowed only with great reluctance and promises that the members would not be photographed.

As the proceedings got under way, I began to understand why these good children of Pilgrims didn't want to be identified. They had a quasi-religious ritual that included the Lord's Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance. I come from a religious background but I had never seen these two combined in one ceremony. Most of the people I know would consider this blasphemy (along with a being a serious violation of the separation of church and state.) It reminded me of the scene in the 2006 movie called the Good Shepard where the Skull and Bones crowd gathered to control the world. They also mixed in Christianity with Angelina Jolie as the Senator's daughter noting that it was first Bones THEN God. I guess it is just easier to run the world if you think that God is on your side.

The guy sitting next to me informed me that he was going to be especially skeptical about my presentation because he was a BIG fan of von Hayek. Oh joy, someone who actually believes that old Hapsburg toady had anything interesting to say about economics. von Hayek was the guy who taught that socialized medicine was the Road to Tyranny. If you want to blame one person for the disaster that is USA medicine, von Hayek is a damn good candidate. I tried not to let this bother me because under any objective standards, von Hayek was not intellectually qualified to wash Veblen's shorts. Which of course, is the main reason von Hayek is treated as a god at the University of Chicago.

It got worse. At the end of my talk, I was subjected to questioning. The event planner asked the final question. He wanted me to comment on the rumors of Veblen's sex life. Veblen wrote 10 books and 100 papers. And this clown wanted to talk about the fact that Veblen lost his job at the Rockefeller-Baptist University of Chicago because he got a divorce. That's Puritanism for you—don't grapple with a man's ideas when you can talk about his sex life. Talk about getting stuck in puberty. It's no damn wonder this nation has become a cesspool of ignorance.

As I prepared to leave, the von Hayek fan made the claim that without government subsidies, Elon Musk (who I had used as an upper-level member of the Producing Class in my talk) would be nowhere. Of course, as Tony could have informed him for days without resorting to notes, virtually ALL scientific and technological advancement in USA was initially funded by the government. In my mind, people with the vision, imagination, and organizational ability of an Elon Musk should be told by the Federal government that we would be providing $20 billion per year to spend on any project he found interesting—especially projects that would help us transition us out of the Age of Fire.

Anyway, I thought I gave a good talk and friend Fabre captured fine video. So while I was busy casting pearls before swine, I think the effort was ultimately useful. Fortunately for me, this blog has readers who are anything BUT swine so I hope you enjoy the effort. I added a 2 minute 40 second graphic animation on my view of Veblen's distinction between business and industry which starts at about the 19 minute mark. This was a LOT of work.

15,000 scientists warn of scientifically predictable global destruction

This is one of those bad-news—worse-news stories. The bad news is that the science on climate change in 1992 was damn near flawless already. And we have gotten a LOT better at it in 25 years. And the science says that without a radical alteration in business-as-usual, we are doomed on this planet. No ifs, ands, or buts.

The worse news is that the brightest minds of the species seem to believe that warnings lead to action. Not without a plan they don't. Preachers have been warning about hell-fire and brimstone for thousands of years and I have yet to see how all that fear-mongering has ever led to a better society. Why is it any better when our best scientists believe that if only their warnings are dire enough, someone in the greater audience will somehow come up with a solution?

We get the point. Climate change is dangerous. Now, oh bright ones, lay out some reasonable possibilities for remediation. I don't want to get all worked up about a problem unless there is something  I can do to help. Otherwise, screaming headlines about the world coming to an end is just meaningless motivation.

Also, I am not at all certain it actually requires 15,000 scientists to tell us we are in deep shit. It seems like 500 could monitor our ride in the handbasket so that 14,500 could work on what to do next. Just a thought.

The economics of waste

There is no particular reason to believe that Charles H. Smith is a Veblen scholar or that he has even read The Theory of the Leisure Class (TOLC). Nevertheless, if someone had been assigned to summarize TOLC, the following would rate an A+ because these are exactly the points Veblen was trying to make. For example, Veblen includes a whole chapter on why the Leisure Classes believe that waste enhances their status, entitled Conspicuous Waste.

This essay is short and sweet, and the reader isn't required to learn a bunch of arcane terms as is the case with a reading of TOLC. Several times in my life I have been asked to "translate" TOLC into modern English. Because I am terrible at such tasks, I have begged off. But I DO think it is a good idea. And however Smith came to write the following, it will be an excellent substitute until someone actually reworks Veblen's classic.

The European Left sells out the Greeks

Watching the American Left slide into irrelevancy at best and utter insanity at worst is certainly distressing but it is hardly surprising. The signs of extreme forms of neoliberalism were already abundantly apparent in the Democratic Party in the 1970s when Jimmy Carter, a mostly unknown peanut farmer / nuclear engineer became President of the United States with the help of David Rockefeller and the Council on Foreign Relations / Trilateral Commission. Carter's Vice President, Walter Mondale, was such a drooling stooge of the establishment that in his presidential run in 1984, he managed to lose debates to Reagan—a guy who was already visibly suffering from dementia / Alzheimers. Mondale couldn't really debate Reagan because on the big issues of economics and foreign policy, they agreed. Of course Mondale didn't go quite as far as 1988 corpo-dem candidate Michael Dukakis who declared, "This race isn't about ideology, it's about competence."

Of course, the left actually did have a granola version of what they believed on hand for such an occasion. They may have thrown in the towel on economics, by gum, but they still had the culture wars to win and food to complain about. And in these arenas, it is hard to argue against their success. For me, this was personal. My political roots were in the Farmer-Labor Party. Their goal was to get a better economic arrangement for factory workers and small farmers. In my mind, if you gave up the economic arguments, you pretty much lost the reason for having a political party.

Oddly enough, I pretty much expected the USA Left to sell out their economic principles. Watching the European Left sell out is much harder to understand. When I first encountered Europe's Left it was in 1970. I was pretty much welcomed because of my anti-Vietnam War activism but when the subject changed to economics and social policy, I felt pretty much lost. Everyone I met who called themselves a Lefty was FAR more theoretical than I was or will ever be. The way I saw it, people who had invested so much time and energy developing their complex theoretical positions seemed highly unlikely to abandon them. I returned from that summer of passionate debates in youth hostels determined to get my theoretical ducks in a row.

So I read some Trotsky, a bunch of Gramsci, etc. Basically what I discovered was that even though these authors could inspire something that resembled revolutionary ardor, none seemed to address the issues that so dominated my early political consciousness—interest rates and usury laws, the creation of money, the regulation of "natural" monopolies, etc. So as we can see from today's brilliant take-down of the modern "Left" by one really furious Greek, we have reasons aplenty to be furious over what has happened to that poor little country. Even IF the Left could awaken some old revolutionary ardor, they are theoretically ill-equipped to comment on such issues as IMF structural adjustments in the age of electronic money—and the rest of the horrors visited on the world's poor.

USA auto sales drop for four straight months

Probably the main observation from my Chicago trip was the seemingly huge mismatch between the purveyors of high quality goods at amazingly reasonable prices presented with all the élan the marketing geniuses can muster and the lack of shoppers buying these offerings. There is something definitely weird about the economy that does not seem to be showing up in the big-time statistics such as unemployment and inflation. Yes, there are those who watch retail sales who see some major-league catastrophes but because retailing is so hopelessly overbuilt, these same folks seem to still be overlooking the more general collapse of purchasing power.

And as if on cue, we are seeing the end of the major USA auto boom that has been driven by low interest rates, cheap fuels, and a wide selection of well-built vehicles. Well, interest rates are still low, the cars are still excellent, and fuels are quite cheap yet sales seem to have hit a wall. Apparently the folks who could buy a new car have bought that car with a five year warranty and payment schedule. So this sales slump could last awhile.

There is also an institutional reason why car sales might never see another 17.55 million unit sales year like 2016 again. Electric cars. Compared to electric cars, the  internal combustion (ICE) vehicle suddenly seem hopelessly complex and unreliable. A well maintained 10-year-old EV is a new battery pack and tires from being essentially a new car. A brushless electric motor has almost nothing to wear out and EVs do not even need gearboxes and exhaust systems. But because going electric involves a bunch of lifestyle changes, it is unlikely there will be a massive boom in EV sales even when the day arrives when EVs have become superior in every objective category for a buy consideration.

Springtime in Chicago

Tony and I had a good reason to meet in Chicago last week. This is his home town and he offered to give me the "deindustrialization tour" of the Second City. So on a splendid spring day he drove me around while I observed. Not surprisingly, some parts of Chicago have absorbed the economic shock of globalism / neoliberalism far better than others.

Some observations:

• The number of places to buy or eat good food seems limitless. The large ethnic populations like the Poles or Italians have their own supermarkets with an astonishing variety of offerings. While all this abundance of good eating appears to herald prosperity, the fact was that none of these establishments had many customers. The restaurant / supermarket business seems hopelessly overbuilt.
• Even the high end retailers along the Miracle Mile seemed to lack sufficient customers.
• Chicago built some pretty amazing public venues in recent years. One spanking new convention center looked to cover at least 5 city blocks. My guess is that the supply of convention space wildly exceeds the need world wide.
• Considering all the talk of corruption in the Chicago construction business, some magnificent building has been done (see below). This pretty much validates Veblen theories in his Instinct of Workmanship.
• The detritus of the South Side steel industry is gone. In its place are large empty fields covered in a lumpy soil that because it is spring, had a pretty good cover of grass. Some of the old industry remains. The Ford Torrence plant was still loading new Lincolns into rail cars. A solitary (but huge) Cargill grain elevator was still operating near the lakeshore—when we drove past it was maybe two miles away separated by a large expanse of grass waving in the wind. If you held your head so you could not see Lake Michigan, it looked astonishingly like North Dakota. One attempt at redevelopment produced a flat and treeless golf course with a overbearing clubhouse built on a hill that was probably the remains of a slag heap.
• The South Side of Chicago where the housing is, is a scene of near hopeless devastation. Both the housing stock and people appear extensively damaged. The neighborhood businesses are in the beauty salon/tattoo parlor/small markets variety. The auto repair business seems safely in the hands of people advertising that they are Mexicans. Even though it was only 5:30 pm., many of those on the streets looked like they had gotten a head start on being wasted for the evening. Whatever it was, it conveyed an expression of profound aimlessness. What was so distressing was that this urban damage went on for miles.
• Tony could not resist taking me back to the motel by way of Wrigleyville—the neighborhood surrounding the stadium where the long-hapless Cubs won the World Series of Baseball last fall. This is the North Side, home to an astonishing number of what we used to call Yuppies, and NO, I have no idea what supports such lifestyles. After eating at a sports bar maybe 50' from the entrance to the bleacher section of Wrigley Stadium, we found ourselves blocked in by a police SUV. I cringed a little but soon discovered the young cop was admiring my 21 yo Lexus. In my 67 years on earth, I have never been so kind and gracious to a cop before.
• Tony stopped at one more sports bar because he has known the owner for years. There we got to watch the Preds-Blues game along with a handful of still-disappointed Black Hawk fans. In spite of the fact that Tony claims this bar serves one of the best pizzas in Chicago, it was also suffering from too few customers.

Chicago's economic ennui is likely shared across the world. But one thing is still abundantly clear—this was once a city of energy, distinction, and vast industrial power. This was a city built by folks of great imagination. Deindustrialization is the proximate cause of the widespread destruction of this city. But more importantly, most of the destruction demonstrates a failure of imagination. Of course, it requires SOME imagination to build a golf course on a slag heap but compared to what was once there, it demonstrates the imagination of a child playing grown-up. In my darker moments I am convinced that we are doomed because we have passed "peak imagination." I hope I am wrong.

Constitutional Foundation of the US Economy: Powers are Implied Not Enumerated

Almost every major advance of the US economy has been nurtured or facilitated at some point by the active involvement and encouragement of the national government. It's been a partnership—sometimes uneasy, sometimes close, but most definitely a partnership—between government and free enterprise, that has led the development of the US economy. This role of the national government was deliberately written into the Constitution, and touches directly on Constitutional issues that the left has ignored, but which the wrong-wing (conservatives and libertarians) have long waged a smear campaign against.

These issues go to the heart of the question: What is the role and purpose of government? They include such specific issues as the General Welfare clause, states rights, implied versus enumerated powers, and the reach and scope of the Commerce clause. Contrary to the idealized wrong-wing myth of the U.S. economy being founded on the principles of laissez-faire, the framers of the Constitution deliberately set out to create a central government strong enough to force the thirteen states into one national economy. To do this, the national government undertook a number of programs and policies to build and strengthen the national economy by encouraging and protecting manufactures and commerce, establishing a national banking system, and promoting and directly assisting the development of transportation.

The first Act of Congress established the administering of oaths of office for federal officials, but the second Act was the imposition of the Hamilton Tariff to protect domestic industry and raise revenue. In 1791, Congress chartered the First Bank of the United States. The Patent Office was created in 1802. Direct federal involvement in the building of transportation infrastructure included projects authorized under the 1807 Coast and Geodetic Survey, and other measures to improve river and harbor navigation, which were formalized and put on a more permanent footing by the 1824 Rivers and Harbors Act. Various Army expeditions to the west, beginning with Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery in 1804 and continuing into the 1870s, gathered and disseminated geographical and scientific knowledge that was crucial to opening the West to settlement (see for example, the careers of Major Stephen Harriman Long, Major General John C. Frémont, and Brigadier General Randolph B. Marcy). These expeditions were almost always under the direction of an officer from the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, an organization that has been almost completely written out of American history, but which comprised the elite of U.S. Army officers. Pursuant to the General Survey Act of 1824, Army officers were assigned to assist or direct the surveying and construction of the early roads, railroads and canals -- whether they were private or state projects did not matter.

Our national government has also played a crucial role in the development of metal-cutting and metal-forming machine tools and mass mechanical assembly, which form the basis of modern industrial economies; the building of a trans-continental railroad system; the application of science to agriculture, and the mechanization of farming; improvements of steam propulsion for maritime transport; development of radio; creation of a nation-wide electricity power grid; creation of a national system of paved roads; development of aviation; development of frozen foods; development of electronics; creation of nuclear power; the creation of computers, and development of the internet.
It is no accident that our national government has played this role of nurturing and facilitating the development of the economy. Such a role was clearly the intent and desire of the Founders—contrary to all the wrong-wing lies about small government and free enterprise. This review of the creation of the Constitution shows that an activist role for government was clearly intended all along. The Republicans and conservatives (I prefer to call them the wrong-wing because so little of what they believe and proclaim about American history is correct) have a directly contrary view of this history.

Deaths of Despair

In what is perhaps the least surprising story of the last 40+ years has gotten a bit of traction. Apparently, people object to being thrown on the social scrap heap so much that after awhile, they just give up and do things that lead to their premature deaths. Meanwhile the economics profession actually has the temerity to congratulate themselves on successfully managing the economy and churn out reams of phony, misleading, and ultimately irrelevant statistics to support their claims. That's pretty much their job, after all—to keep the unhappy peasants from hanging the financial classes from the lampposts.

So now we have rising death statistics to refute the claim that everything is just fine out there. So the new answer is to somehow trivialize these stark realities. The essay below from Business Insider has its moments but mostly its an attempt to cover death-inducing hopelessness with some psychobabble and some quotes from Emile Durkheim (please!)

As for me, I always revert to the Institutionalist response to terminal hopelessness—PUT THESE PEOPLE TO WORK at decent jobs that have meaning and purpose. You know, like rebuilding the infrastructure to meet the specifications of a fire-free future. I also believe in the Instinct of Workmanship as described by Veblen and am still swayed by my Lutheran upbringing that taught work was a form of devotion. Regular readers cannot be surprised by any of this.

'Deaths of Despair' are more than a sign of neoliberal incompetence, it demonstrates these fools are also heartless and cold-blooded killers. The ONLY way they can possibly sleep is to comfort themselves with the rationalization that the dying are mostly victims of their failure to 'learn' the principles and 'virtues' of Leisure Class uselessness.