Looking Back
Excerpt from Garet Garrett's American Story:
During the Great Depression the imperious tradition of limited government was sacrificed, and the ground principles of free, competitive enterprise were compromised beyond redemption.
The people were willing. They were not coerced. They were writhing in economic pain. Many forgot and many more seemed no longer to care that unless they absorbed their own troubles instead of unloading them on a paternalistic government they would never again be as free as their fathers were.
If the government intervened to increase the bargaining power of labor, in order to keep wages rising, it would thereafter control the labor contract by law. If it took extraordinary measures to restore the farmer's profit it would have to mind his sowing and reaping. If it undertook to provide social security it would have to make thrift compulsory. And so on. FULL ARTICLE
Comments (7)
Barry Loberfeld
"This holds notwithstanding the fact that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor instantly united the people for World War II. That was a simple reflex action. Yet anyone who will read the diplomatic history of American-Japanese relations must realize that the Japanese were goaded into making the attack. If the Roosevelt administration had not been looking for the perfect pretext to enter the war against Hitler the attack on Pearl Harbor might have been averted — even afterward Hitler was the number-one enemy."
Michael Shermer (Denying History) — a skeptic before he's a libertarian — has noted the scant evidence for this thesis. I'n not sure why we should continue tying the freedom credo to it.
Published: September 14, 2009 9:59 AM
mpolzkill
Barry,
Garet Garrett and those like him were only on the scene watching it, describing it for a decade. It is only the M.O. of American imperialists. Almost to the day they were done goading, slaughtering and emasculating the very last American Indian, they started to work on the rest of the world. Many of their shock troops and garrison keepers today even call all who resist "Injuns".
Published: September 14, 2009 10:15 AM
Gil
"Yet anyone who will read the diplomatic history of American-Japanese relations must realize that the Japanese were goaded into making the attack."
So the U.S. initiated aggression against the Japanese in turn were merely defending themselves?
Published: September 14, 2009 10:17 AM
mpolzkill
No, Gil, this is it in short: (you should appreciate this as an inveterate sycophant of power.) The Japanese were basically trying to do to the Western Pacific, China and the rest of East Asia what the U.S. had done to Latin America. U.S. imperialists had their own plans for Asia and more and more began to seriously crimp Japanese plans. The smaller bully ended up getting a beat down from the bully that subsequently became the biggest in history when the Japanese bit off more than they could chew at Pearl Harbor.
Published: September 14, 2009 10:29 AM
Shed Plant
Plus, an embargo is an act of war.
Published: September 14, 2009 11:19 AM
jl
This book is reminiscent of another Garrett work, The Wild Wheel, which shows how the Ford Motor Company became great and then....well, look at them today. You see the same sheer determination, the supply of raw materials and production on a vast scale that was previously unimaginable. A product became available to the masses. Then came the decline of the company, along the same lines as the country.
Published: September 14, 2009 1:08 PM
Brad
Gil,
It should be understood that the US and Japan were economic allies for a number of years. When our relationship (and the Japanese relationship with the UK as well) soured, there were tensions running high. Diplomatic negotiations had been carried on for years prior. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was at the behest of Germany (with whom Japan turned to after severing ties with the US and UK in the twenties and forged an iron alliance with apace) as the US was de facto at war with Germany in the Atlantic regarding shipping and of course the lend lease programs with the UK and Soviet Russia. Germany and Japan struck a deal and Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the rest is history. But it was as a consequence of US involvement in a de facto war with Germany and a bristling attitude toward Japan.
So while there is no doubt that Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan were aggressor States, it is true that the UK and the US interceded against their plans not out of some altruistic motives but out of economic pursuits. War is always about access to resources, and ALL the players involved were fixing on making sure their respective Nation States benefited from the exploitation of foreign lands for the benefit of their own people. The notion that the US was sitting idly by minding their own business and got cold cocked is nonsense. The point made in the article is that before WWI the US likely would have stayed out of foreign affairs and that by entering WWI they overturned tradition and we left ourselves open to everything that came after. From the mid-1850's onward the US was fashioning itself a nice, tidy little Welfare/Warfare State, just as most European and many Asian countries were doing too. The better part of the last 200 years worldwide has been to take what were once petty wars between fiefdoms, then elevated in scale from the 1400's-1800's but still limited in scope, on to huge global spasms of death and destruction we know as WWI and WWII (if not the Cold War too). The US's role, despite the history books, isn't anymore altruistic than the rest, though perhaps executed more stupidly.
Published: September 14, 2009 4:24 PM