Keynesian Predictions vs. American History
Tom Woods is a very lucid and exciting speaker. I love this particular lecture because it reveals some monumental bits of hidden history.
Lecture begins @ 5:00.
@8:20 Tom Woods talks about how Keynesians predicted massive unemployment and a depression in 1946 because of demobilization of the military and huge reductions in government spending. In fact, 1946 was the single greatest economic year for the United States.
@18:00 Tom Woods talk about influential American economist Paul Samuelson who repeatedly praised the Soviet Union in an influential Economic text widely used in classrooms from 1973 to 1989. Samuelson wrote, among other things, that Soviet political oppression might be worth its economic gains.
In the 1989 edition he wrote “Contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, the Soviet economy is proof that a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.”
There was gigantic Soviet propaganda in the United States, and I like when people have the courage to point it out.
Technology and Social Change
I love this lecture by Jeffrey Tucker for its last ten minutes. Skip to 20:00 if you just want the best of it. He dispels the myths that progress is driven by government force or even by great individuals. Eli Whitney did not invent the cotton gin (people have been ginning cotton since the 5th century), and the Wright brothers did not invent the airplane. (They got one little patent, and sued the pants off everyone else working on airplanes. This set American aviation back so far that the U.S. had to buy planes from France during WWI.)
Progress, he argues, is made in little steps by ordinary people imitating success and making modest improvements. I found this very inspirational.