.
If a
mandatory evacuation from your storm-threatened
holiday leaves you with time on your hands, or you have
energy left for reading after the hassles of
airport security and can block out the incessant
blared warnings over the airport loudspeakers, here are
some diverting suggestions.
For light reading with a weighty
message, try Bill Fawcett and Brian Thomsen`s
"You Did What?" These short readable essays
require little concentration and are just what you need
to reinforce your opinion that those in power
seldom know what they are doing. Airport security
cannot tell grandma from a terrorist, but
Joseph Stalin managed to murder every general and
officer
in the Red Army just in time for
Hitler`s invasion.
You may envy those
highly paid executives being decanted from luxury
jets into limousines who know little of canceled flights
and long airport waits. But Fawcett and Thomsen will
soothe envy`s sting as they serve you a scrumptious
smorgasbord of "mad plans and great historical
disasters" perpetrated by those in charge.
Here are three of them:
In 1985, Coca Cola`s bigwigs were
anxious about Pepsi`s growing market share. Their
solution? They abandoned Coke`s time-proven vintage
recipe for something bland and sweet called the "New
Coke." Four months later, after the eruption of
public hostility to the new product and the creation of
a
black market in the old Coke, Coca Cola executives
returned to the tried and true formula.
In 1966, politically savvy
California Democratic Governor, Pat Brown, influenced
the GOP primary vote in favor of an "easy to beat
candidate,"
Ronald Reagan, who went on to become a two-term
governor of California and a two-term
president of the US.
In 1920, Boston Red Sox owner,
Harrison Frazee, traded a "has-been" pitcher to
Colonel Jacob Ruppert, owner of the New York Yankees
for $125,000 cash and a loan just over twice that amount
to finance a Broadway production. Ruppert utilized the
"has been" pitcher as a hitter, thus launching the
stellar career of
George Herman "Babe" Ruth and repaying Ruppert`s
investment dozens of times over. Alas,
Frazee`s Red Sox never managed to recover their
dominance."
Feel better now? With your fresh
awareness of the foibles of the high and mighty, you
will be all the more able to enjoy Robert Higg`s
"Against Leviathan,"
Llewellyn Rockwell`s
"Speaking of Liberty," and James Bovard`s
"Terrorism and Tyranny." These authors are
liberty`s sentinels. They document the chains we acquire
as we defer to "government knows best."
Government decision-makers are
wrong more often than CEOs, the best of whom are right
just 45% of the time. Whereas a bad corporate decision
can harm employees and shareholders, a bad government
decision effects everyone.
Take the Great Depression for
example. Believing that the 1929 stock market crash was
caused by too much liquidity, the "all-wise" Federal
Reserve central bank
withdrew liquidity from the banking system precisely
at the time when more liquidity was needed to prevent
mass unemployment.
Once the government caused the
disaster, government
proceeded to make matters worse. Americans have been
brainwashed to believe that President
Franklin D. Roosevelt`s New Deal saved the US
economy. But as Higgs shows in his chapter,
"The Mythology of Roosevelt and the New Deal,"
Roosevelt`s policies delayed the economy`s recovery
for an entire decade.
Roosevelt`s success was not in
ending the depression but "in revolutionizing the
institutions of US political and economic life and in
changing the country`s dominant ideology." In place
of a nation of independent citizens, America became a
collection of government-dependent interest groups and
welfare beggars.
Rockwell`s essays show how
government uses everything from compassion to patriotism
for self-aggrandizement. In
"The Economics of Discrimination," Rockwell
tells about some of the absurdities and economic
rip-offs that have been spawned by civil rights and
disabilities legislation.
Did you know that a man in a
wheelchair sued for the right to coach third base on a
baseball team and that a blind man sued for the right to
be a firefighter? Did you know that the Shawmut Bank in
Connecticut was forced by the US government to provide
millions of dollars in loans to
"preferred minorities" who couldn`t pass a
credit check?
If you believe that your government
is protecting you from terrorism with the Patriot Act
and the invasion and occupation of Iraq, you desperately
need to read Bovard`s book. The war on terror has taken
a far greater toll on American civil liberties and the
lives of American soldiers than it has taken on
terrorism. In trying to chase down one man, Osama bin
Laden, the US government has invaded and abused two
Muslim countries and made 1.3 billion Muslims America`s
enemies, while simultaneously destroying our own
alliances with our own kind.
Will the follies we are witnessing
today be the modern renditions of Napoleon`s march into
Russia and Stalin`s elimination of the Red Army`s
officer class on the eve of Hitler`s invasion? Perhaps
the events of our own time will qualify for the second
edition of "You Did What?"
COPYRIGHT CREATORS
SYNDICATE, INC.
Paul Craig Roberts is the author with Lawrence M.
Stratton of
The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and
Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name
of Justice
