The Decline of the American Republic, by John T. Flynn (1955), in full text pdf
The chief causes of serious depressions are booms, which are created by enormous and unhealthy expansion of credit, particularly bank credit. The depression is the headache after the spree. The depression of 1929 was due to several causes which ordinarily would have forced business into a moderate decline. But the extraordinary energy of the boom of 1923 to 1929 was created chiefly by a wild orgy of speculation of every sort, superimposed on a group of more or less normal activities—and ending in a disorderly crash.
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Another great find, gentlemen!
If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were going through my library for those rare and unusual works of the Old Right and Austrian Economics! Pretty soon, I’ll be able get rid of half of my library and just use your site online for all of my rereading!
Best to you,
Just a thought.
Just Ken
kgregglv@cox.net
http://classicalliberalism.blogspot.com
Another great find, gentlemen!
If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were going through my library for those rare and unusual works of the Old Right and Austrian Economics! Pretty soon, I’ll be able get rid of half of my library and just use your site online for all of my rereading!
Best to you,
Just a thought.
Just Ken
kgregglv@cox.net
http://classicalliberalism.blogspot.com
Now if only someone would or could make available some of P.T. Bauer’s treatises on development aid available online…
I’ve never in my life encountered a conglomerate of individuals more committed to an intellectual development and expansion of ideas and the foundation for those ideas than the Mises Institute.
The generous provision of learning material and supplementals found here is astonishing. Telling thing, isn’t it, that the entities pushing socialism – done, obviously, by appealing to the dispossessed and downtrodden – aren’t near as willing to be so generous with copyrighted materials and other, more tangible assets. Ironic thing that the only measurable profit that seems to drive the Mises Institute is an upward tick in intellectual capital.
I loved “A Country Squire in the White House” and “As We Go Marching”. They’re difficult to find elsewhere and my pocketbook doesn’t go very far as yet. I’m looking forward to sitting down with these two newly available works.
I recently finished Althusser’s “Essays in Self-Criticism” and Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation”. Socialist scholarship is so wearying. What a bleak world the socialist future portends, how did people like Althusser and Polanyi ever achieve any kind of following in the first place? It’s mystifying. To criticize and second-guess even one’s minor actions each day in order to make sure that one is in accordance with Marx’s dogma… the promise of atheist socialism seems feigned indeed, one higher power for another.
In any event, after those bleak exercises, it’s going to be refreshing to curl up with these Flynn tomes.
Thanks!
Another sign of the apocalypse:
Savings rate in the US is at a 74 year low. It was -1% of income. Speaking of which, 74 years ago is about the time the Gread Depression was going on. How, um, depressing.
Note that the savings rate refered to above does not count 401k, real estate, or other investments. Only savings in low interest accounts (and CDs). Nobody in their right mind keeps too much money in such accounts. (You have a small emergency fund in those accounts because you can convert them to cash at a moments need, but no more because they are a poor use of money overall)
Though I was a bit disappointed with Flynn’s analysis of the causes of the depression, the rest of the book including its basic premise was superb.
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