Trivial Outsourcing Pursuits

by Alan Reynolds

"If Sen. John Kerry had hoped to make a big political issue out of an unemployment rate that is likely to be below 5 percent by election time, he had better start trying to change the subject as soon as possible. And his never-ending wisecracks about Herbert Hoover could backfire, too, because Hoover enacted the same policies key Democrats now recommend -- namely, higher tax rates and tariffs."

Jean-Francois Revel, Anti-Americanism, p. 41 hc. describes the twenties "thusly:"

...[A]fter the catastrophe of the First World War, Europe drew back and turned in on herself. Her supremacy was a thing of the past. Moreover, she became divided within as countries erected barriers against each other. On the other side of the Atlantic, the United States, Argentina and Brazil, whose immense territories were traditionally open to immigrants and foreign products, barricaded themselves in their turn. International trade plummeted, capital could no longer circulate, exchange controls were intituted and there were efforts to fix currencies by decree. Thus, all over the world, economic life stagnated and came to resemble what today's enemies of globalism desire for us. The result was not long in coming: the stock market crash of 1929, followed by the Great Depression, which lasted a decade with tens of millions unemployed, and the rise of dictatorships and totalitarian regimes as a consequence of the universal and precipitous decline in liveng standards.... And to crown this brilliant series of successes came the Second World War, from which Europe emerged not only materially and economically destroyed, but this time deposed for good from great-power status.