Goin' on two years later....

...I'd about given up the idea of "blogging" at all, and of course meanwhile we in the good old USA have been circling the drain at best. But as I've been reading more and more -- of course! -- I've found more and more instances of half-truths, deliberate and perhaps not deliberate, in what's out there.

To take an obvious though perhaps a bit obscure example, there's a fellow named Bill Bonner, who writes / edits an internet newsletter -- but who wrote a book, with a fellow named Addison Wiggins, called Empire of Debt. (Wiggins subsequently wrote one called I.O.U.S.A.) Empire of Debt has gained some, er...currency. Bonner is evidently very much of or at least greatly influenced by the "Austrian School" of economics, and there is much there as to debt -- both private and public -- that is fine.

But the man is blatantly anti-democratic and a "free market" type who views -- or at least portrays -- almost all forms of public "community" endeavor as disastrous. In Empire of Debt he portrays Abraham Lincoln as a "do gooder" in the company of the likes of Woodrow Wilson and, in doing so, he suggests that the American Civil War was undertaken to free the slaves -- which is utter nonsense. He likewise suggests strongly that the American involvement in WWII was a Rooseveltian exercise in imperialism. And overall he treats the entire topic of imperialism as some sort of macho bravado and professes not to know of any rational basis for it. This is where I have to question the man's honesty, because he is obviously very intelligent, he apparently reads quite a bit, and there are suggestions -- to me, at any rate -- that he has had some contact with the anti-imperialist writings of the late William Appleman Williams, if not with those of J.A. Hobson.

For example, he quotes at one point Oliver Cromwell's remark about having the integrity to consider whether one might be wrong. Ignoring for the moment the irony of this, that is a fairly obscure remark, and the only other place I have seen it is in one of Williams's books, perhaps Empire As a Way of Life.

But whether or not Bonner has read Williams, he should have. I find it both absurd and ridiculous that any writer should expend considerable time and effort on screeds attacking imperialism without having bothered to read both Williams and Hobson, and thus apparently having no basis other than the "Austrian School" for any sort of understanding of the central problem, for capitalism, of economic "busts and booms." Even prominent Libertarians featured on Lew Rockwell's fine site have acknowledged Williams's important contributions to anti-imperialist thought, though not specifically his updating of Hobson's central critique in Ch. 6 of his early-20th-century Imperialism. Without understanding the Hobson / Williams critique -- and Hobson's greatly informed Lord Keynes' efforts (and FDR's) to save capitalism from itself --one is pretty much left with only the "Austrian School" explanation of economic depressions, and while in my view that explanation is cogent and important, it is seriously incomplete. That is to say, the two explanations are not at all mutually exclusive, and it is essential to understand both of them.

Without that understanding, one cannot grasp the rational basis for economic imperialism, and would be left with no way of getting beyond (for example) Bonner's simplistic and thus dangerous views on what has gone wrong with America -- including his condemnations of democracy and everything that has been done, in Western democracies, in the public interest, apart from "national defence" and the like. This sort of thing has become commonplace, of course, among our extreme "right wing" "thinkers," including prominently the late Margaret Thatcher's notorious dictum that there is no such thing as community, only individuals. The Bonners of the world have as their goal the utter destruction of society itself, leaving only predatory individuals to stuff themselves as much as possible at the expense of all others, the others -- as Bonner himself repeatedly calls them, borrowing from Karl Marx -- being the "lumpen proletariat." The mob. We slobs who do not believe that the only legitimate goal of a human being is to become as wealthy as possible, regardless of the consequences to what the overwhelming majority of us ["lumpen proletariat"] have always felt was most important, our communities, from our villages and towns and cities and States to our country itself. Sentimental nonsense, according to the likes of Bonner and Wiggins et al.

-- Bill