Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: 'Why society needed historians to act as professional remembrancers of what their fellow citizens wish to forget'

Similarities between 1929 and 2008 terrifying
Watching Wall Street and the American real-estate market crumble over the
past 10 months has not inspired great confidence in our wonderful
free-market economy or the land pirates who run it. As someone who recently
wrestled with the causes and consequences of the Great Depression, I find
the current economic shipwreck not merely spooky but downright terrifying.
    Working as a historian is a discouraging business. No one seems to learn
anything from history - that's pretty much a given - but we keep hoping. As
a chronicler of the 19th century American West, I had my work cut out when a
family friend asked me to write a biography of her father, Judge Wilson
McCarthy.
    Herbert Hoover appointed McCarthy to represent Western Democrats on the
board of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Hoover's only real response
to the worst economic disaster in American history. The RFC attempted to
restore liquidity to the economy by getting cash out from underneath
mattresses and into circulation.
    Last year I had to look up "liquidity" to remind myself what it meant.
Today I could sort through 23.2 million Google hits to learn more.
    "History doesn't repeat itself," Mark Twain said, "but it does rhyme."
    The similarities between economic conditions in 1929 and 2008 rhyme like
hickory, dickory, dock. As early as 1935, "brain truster" Rexford Tugwell
identified the root cause of the Great Depression as the failure "to pass on
a fair share of the spectacular productivity gains of the 1920s" to both
labor and consumers.
    An enduring agricultural depression, the grossly inequitable
distribution of wealth, massive consumer debt, tax cuts for the rich and
what historian Robert S. McElvaine called "the wild speculation of the
decade's orgy of greed," all made matters worse. This multifaceted
bankruptcy led to the Great Depression, but massive corporate corruption and
the incompetence of the ruling class are unappreciated, if familiar, factors
in creating the catastrophe.
Free marketeers struggle to explain away the collapse of the virtually
unregulated economy of the Roaring Twenties. In 1963 economist Milton
Friedman elucidated the failure of laissez faire as "a tragic testimonial to
the importance of monetary forces." Adam Smith's disciples laid the blame on
the regulators, specifically the Federal Reserve Board's attempt to rein in
speculation on Wall Street.
    At Friedman's 90th birthday celebration in 2002, then-Fed board member
Ben Bernanke said, "You're right, we did it. We're very sorry." I wonder
what Chairman Bernanke is sorry for now?
    The only trouble with capitalism is the capitalists, Herbert Hoover told
a journalist. "They're too damn greedy." The Depression proved him right.
"We must all do our bit," said J. P. Morgan, but the great financier did not
pay a nickel in federal income tax in 1930, and neither he nor his partners
paid any in 1931 or 1932.
    Treasury Secretary Ogden Mills granted his father's estate $6 million in
relief on what is now damned as the "death tax." The Chicago Tribune called
on citizens to pay their full taxes, while its publisher, tycoon Robert R.
McCormick, handed over only $1,515. Investment banker S.J.T. Strauss paid a
whopping $18 in taxes. At the same time, wealthy Americans sent $100 million
in gold to Europe every week in the first months of 1932.
    As a survivor of what he called "the Great Slump," the great European
historian Eric Hobsbawm found it almost impossible to grasp how free-market
orthodoxy, so obviously discredited in 1933, "once again came to preside
over a global period of depression in the late 1980s and 1990s."
    Hobsbawm believed this strange phenomenon evoked "the incredible
shortness of memory of both the theorists and practitioners of economics."
It also showed why society needed historians to act as "professional
remembrancers of what their fellow citizens wish to forget."
    There are differences between today and 1929; for example, the dollar
was in great shape and the deficit was virtually nonexistent. So why worry?
Most historians believe history doesn't repeat itself. It just seems to.
http://www.sltrib.com/Opinion/ci_9794754
-- 
Give us back our countries: Stop the criminal multiculturalism ideology
enforced upon the white world against the will of its peoples, leading to
mass immigration from the third-world: Mul-cul + pol-corr = lethal mixture
for the white world. And give us back our freedom: Dismantle all
surveillance technology.


http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_depressione#La_crisi_fuori_dagli_USA
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estratto di
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_depressione
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