Tag Archives: Hidden History

Memos show US hushed up Soviet crime

open quoteThe American POWs sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area.

The testimony about the infamous massacre of Polish officers might have lessened the tragic fate that befell Poland under the Soviets, some scholars believe. Instead, it mysteriously vanished into the heart of American power. The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn’t want to anger Josef Stalin, an ally whom the Americans were counting on to defeat Germany and Japan during World War II.

Documents released Monday and seen in advance by The Associated Press lend weight to the belief that suppression within the highest levels of the U.S. government helped cover up Soviet guilt in the killing of some 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners in the Katyn forest and other locations in 1940.

The evidence is among about 1,000 pages of newly declassified documents that the United States National Archives released and is putting online. Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, who helped lead a recent push for the release of the documents, called the effort’s success Monday a “momentous occasion” in an attempt to “make history whole.”close quote (Read more)

18th Century comparison of Gold-rich Spain vs Actually-rich Holland

open quote… is from page 613 of the 2003 Liberty Fund collection, edited by Henry C. Clark, Commerce, Culture, and Liberty: Readings on Capitalism Before Adam Smith; specifically, it’s from the 1777 J. Justamond translation of Guillaume-Thomas-Francois, abbe Raynal’s 1770 essay, “A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies”:

The Spaniards though possessed of all the gold in the world remained or became poor; the Dutch presently acquired riches, without either lands or mines. Holland is a nation at the service of all the rest, but who sells her services at a high price. As soon as she had taken refuge in the midst of the sea, with industry and freedom, which are her tutelary gods, she perceived that she had not sufficient quantity of land to support the sixth part of her inhabitants. She then chose the whole world for her domain, and resolved to enjoy it by her navigation and commerce. She made all lands contribute to her subsistence, and all nations supply her with the conveniences of life.

close quote (Read more)

1892 – Democrats Pro Parenting

“We are opposed to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children as an infringement of the fundamental Democratic doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best government.” ~ Democratic Party National Platform, 1892.

Shout out to Jeffrey Tucker for finding this.

The Real Reason for Germany’s Industrial Expansion: No Copyright Law

Very interesting read. The case for small states and political division, in addition to no IP:

open quoteThe entire country seemed to be obsessed with reading. The sudden passion for books struck even booksellers as strange and in 1836 led literary critic Wolfgang Menzel to declare Germans “a people of poets and thinkers.”

“That famous phrase is completely misconstrued,” declares economic historian Eckhard Höffner, 44. “It refers not to literary greats such as Goethe and Schiller,” he explains, “but to the fact that an incomparable mass of reading material was being produced in Germany.”

Höffner has researched that early heyday of printed material in Germany and reached a surprising conclusion — unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century.

German authors during this period wrote ceaselessly. Around 14,000 new publications appeared in a single year in 1843. Measured against population numbers at the time, this reaches nearly today’s level. And although novels were published as well, the majority of the works were academic papers.

The situation in England was very different. “For the period of the Enlightenment and bourgeois emancipation, we see deplorable progress in Great Britain,” Höffner states.

Equally Developed Industrial Nation

Indeed, only 1,000 new works appeared annually in England at that time — 10 times fewer than in Germany — and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900.

Even more startling is the factor Höffner believes caused this development — in his view, it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom.

Germany, on the other hand, didn’t bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany’s biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany’s continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire.

Höffner’s diligent research is the first academic work to examine the effects of the copyright over a comparatively long period of time and based on a direct comparison between two countries, and his findings have caused a stir among academics. Until now, copyright was seen as a great achievement and a guarantee for a flourishing book market. Authors are only motivated to write, runs the conventional belief, if they know their rights will be protected.

Yet a historical comparison, at least, reaches a different conclusion. Publishers in England exploited their monopoly shamelessly. New discoveries were generally published in limited editions of at most 750 copies and sold at a price that often exceeded the weekly salary of an educated worker.

London’s most prominent publishers made very good money with this system, some driving around the city in gilt carriages. Their customers were the wealthy and the nobility, and their books regarded as pure luxury goods. In the few libraries that did exist, the valuable volumes were chained to the shelves to protect them from potential thieves.

In Germany during the same period, publishers had plagiarizers — who could reprint each new publication and sell it cheaply without fear of punishment — breathing down their necks. Successful publishers were the ones who took a sophisticated approach in reaction to these copycats and devised a form of publication still common today, issuing fancy editions for their wealthy customers and low-priced paperbacks for the masses.

A Multitude of Treatises

This created a book market very different from the one found in England. Bestsellers and academic works were introduced to the German public in large numbers and at extremely low prices. “So many thousands of people in the most hidden corners of Germany, who could not have thought of buying books due to the expensive prices, have put together, little by little, a small library of reprints,” the historian Heinrich Bensen wrote enthusiastically at the time.

The prospect of a wide readership motivated scientists in particular to publish the results of their research. In Höffner’s analysis, “a completely new form of imparting knowledge established itself.”

Essentially the only method for disseminating new knowledge that people of that period had known was verbal instruction from a master or scholar at a university. Now, suddenly, a multitude of high-level treatises circulated throughout the country.close quote (Read more)

The Adam Smith Myth by Murray Rothbard

open quoteAdam Smith (1723–90) is a mystery in a puzzle wrapped in an enigma. The mystery is the enormous and unprecedented gap between Smith’s exalted reputation and the reality of his dubious contribution to economic thought.

Smith’s reputation almost blinds the sun. From shortly after his own day until very recently, he was thought to have created the science of economics virtually de novo. He was universally hailed as the Founding Father. Books on the history of economic thought, after a few well-deserved sneers at the mercantilists and a nod to the physiocrats, would invariably start with Smith as the creator of the discipline of economics. Any errors he made were understandably excused as the inevitable flaws of any great pioneer.

Innumerable words have been written about him. At the bicentennial of his magnum opus, An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), a veritable flood of books, essays, and memorabilia poured forth about the quiet Scottish professor. His profile sculpted on a medallion by Tassie is known throughout the world. A hagiographic movie was even made about Smith during the bicentennial by a free market foundation, and businessmen and free market advocates have long hailed Adam Smith as their patron saint.

‘Adam Smith ties’ were worn as a badge of honour in the upper echelons of the Reagan Administration.

On the other hand, Marxists, with somewhat more justice, hail Smith as the ultimate inspiration of their own Founding Father, Karl Marx. Indeed, if the average person were asked to name two economists in history whom he has heard of, Smith and Marx would probably be the runaway winners of the poll.

As we have already seen, Smith was scarcely the founder of economic science, a science which existed since the medieval scholastics and, in its modern form, since Richard Cantillon. But what the German economists used to call, in a narrower connection, Das AdamSmithProblem,[i] is much more severe than that. For the problem is not simply that Smith was not the founder of economics.

. . . .

The mystery of Adam Smith, then, is the immense gap between a monstrously overinflated reputation and the dismal reality. But the problem is worse than that; for it is not just that Smith’s Wealth of Nations has had a terribly overblown reputation from his day to ours. The problem is that the Wealth of Nations was somehow able to blind all men, economists and laymen alike, to the very knowledge that other economists, let alone better ones, had existed and written before 1776. The Wealth of Nations exerted such a colossal impact on the world that all knowledge of previous economists was blotted out, hence Smith’s reputation as Founding Father. The historical problem is this: how could this phenomenon have taken place with a book so derivative, so deeply flawed, so much less worthy than its predecessors?

The answer is surely not any lucidity or clarity of style or thought. For the much-revered Wealth of Nations is a huge, sprawling, inchoate, confused tome, rife with vagueness, ambiguity and deep inner contradictions. There is of course an advantage, in the history of social thought, to a work being huge, sprawling, ambivalent and confused. There is sociological advantage to vagueness and obscurity. The bemused German Smithian, Christian J. Kraus, once referred to the Wealth of Nations as the ‘Bible’ of political economy. In a sense, Professor Kraus spoke wiser than he knew. For, in one way, the Wealth of Nations is like the Bible; it is possible to derive varying and contradictory interpretations from various – or even the same – parts of the book. Furthermore, the very vagueness and obscurity of a work can provide a happy hunting ground for intellectuals, students and followers. To make one’s way through an obscure and difficult tract, to weave dimly perceived threads of a book into a coherent pattern – these are rewarding tasks in themselves for intellectuals.

. . . .

The division of labour

It is appropriate to begin a discussion of Smith’s Wealth of Nations with the division of labour, since Smith himself begins there and since for Smith this division had crucial and decisive importance. His teacher Hutcheson had also analysed the importance of the division of labour in the developing economy, as had Hume, Turgot, Mandeville, James Harris and other economists. But for Smith the division of labour took on swollen and gigantic importance, putting into the shade such crucial matters as capital accumulation and the growth of technological knowledge. As Schumpeter has pointed out, never for any economist before or since did the division of labour assume such a position of commanding importance.

But there are more troubles in the Smithian division of labour than his exaggerating its importance. The older and truer perception of the motive power for specialization and exchange was simply that each party to an exchange (which is necessarily two-party and two-commodity) benefits (or at least expects to benefit) from the exchange; otherwise the trade would not take place. But Smith unfortunately shifts the main focus from mutual benefit to an alleged irrational and innate ‘propensity to truck, barter and exchange’, as if human beings were lemmings determined by forces external to their own chosen purposes. As Edwin Cannan pointed out, Smith took this tack because he rejected the idea of innate differences in natural talents and abilities, which would naturally seek out different specialized occupations. Smith instead took the egalitarian-environmentalist position, still dominant today in neoclassical economics, that all labourers are equal, and therefore that differences between them can only be the result rather than a cause of the system of the division of labour.

In addition, Smith failed to apply his analysis of the division of labour to international trade, where it would have provided powerful ammunition for his own free trade policies. It was to be left to James Mill to make such an application in his excellent theory of comparative advantage. Furthermore, domestically, Smith placed far too much importance on the division of labour within a factory or industry, while neglecting the more significant division of labour among industries.

But if Smith had an undue appreciation of the importance of the division of labour, he paradoxically sowed great problems for the future by introducing the chronic modern sociological complaint about specialization that was picked up quickly by Karl Marx and has been advanced to a high art by socialist gripers about ‘alienation’. There is no gainsaying the fact that Smith totally contradicted himself between Book I and Book V of the Wealth of Nations. In the former, the division of labour alone accounts for the affluence of civilized society, and indeed the division of labour is repeatedly equated with ‘civilization’ throughout the book. And yet, while in Book I the division of labour is hailed as expanding the alertness and intelligence of the population, in Book V it is condemned as leading to their intellectual as well as moral degeneration, to the loss of their ‘intellectual, social and martial virtues’. There is no way that this contradiction can be plausibly reconciled.[vi]

Adam Smith, though himself a plagiarist of considerable dimensions, also had a Columbus complex, often accusing other people unfairly of plagiarizing him. In 1755 he actually laid claim to having invented the concept of laissez-faire, or the system of natural liberty, asserting that he had taught these principles since his Edinburgh lectures in 1749. That may be: but the claim ignores previous such expressions by his own teachers as well as by Grotius and Pufendorf, to say nothing of Boisguilbert and the other French laissez-faire thinkers of the late seventeenth century.

In 1769, the contentious Smith levied a plagiarism charge against Principal William Robertson, upon the occasion of the publication of the latter’s History of the Reign of Charles V. It is not known what the topic of the literary theft was supposed to be, and it is difficult to guess, considering the remoteness from Smith’s work of the theme of the Robertson book.

. . . .

In contrast, then, to those historians who praise Smith for his empirical grasp of contemporary economic and industrial affairs, Adam Smith was oblivious to the important economic events around him. Much of his analysis was wrong, and many of the facts he did include in the Wealth of Nations were obsolete and gathered from books 30 years old.

Productive vs. unproductive labour

One of the physiocrats’ more dubious contributions to economic thought was their view that only agriculture was productive, that only agriculture contributed a surplus, a produit net, to the economy. Smith, heavily influenced by the physiocrats, retained the unfortunate concept of ‘productive’ labour, but expanded it from agriculture to material goods in general. For Smith, then, labour on material objects was ‘productive’; but labour on, say, consumer services, on immaterial production, was ‘unproductive’.

Smith’s bias in favour of material objects amounted to a bias in favour of investment in capital goods, since a stock of capital goods by definition has to be embodied in material objects. Consumer goods, on the other hand, either consist of immaterial services, or they get used up – consumed – in the process of consumption. Smith’s imprimatur on material production, therefore, was an indirect way of advocating investment in an accumulation of capital goods as against the very goal of producing capital goods: increased consumption. When discussing exports and imports, Smith realized full well that there was no point to amassing intermediate objects except that they eventually be consumed, that the only goal of production is consumption. But as Professor Roger Garrison has pointed out, and as we shall see further on the question of usury laws, Adam Smith’s Presbyterian conscience led him to value the expenditure of labour per se, for its own sake, and led him to balk at free market time-preferences between consumption and saving. Clearly, Smith wanted far more investment towards future production and less present consumption than the market was willing to choose. One of the contradictions of this position, of course, is that accumulating more capital goods at the expense of present consumption will eventually result in a higher standard of living unless Smith prepared to counsel a perpetual and accelerated shift toward more and more never-to-be-consumed means of production.close quote (Read more)

Adam Smith vs Cantillon & Turgot

I may have posted this before, but it’s fascinating. Deserves a second look.

open quoteOne of the great puzzles in the history of economic thought, as we have indicated in Volume 1, is why Adam Smith was able to sweep the field and enjoy the reputation of “founder of economic science” when Cantillon and Turgot had been far superior, both as technical economic analysts and as champions of laissez-faire. The mystery is particularly acute for France, since in Britain the only schools competing with the Smithians were the mercantilists and the political arithmeticians.

The mystery deepens when we realize that the great leader of French economics after Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832), was really in the Cantillon-Turgot tradition rather than that of Smith even though he greatly neglected the former and proclaimed that economics began with Adam Smith. He, Say, was supposedly only systematizing the wonderful but inchoate truths found in the Wealth of Nations. We shall see below the precise nature of Say’s thought and his contributions, as well as his decidedly “French” non-Smithian, and “pre-Austrian” logical clarity and emphasis on the praxeologic axiomatic-deductive method, on utility as the sole source of economic value, on the entrepreneur, on the productivity of the factors of production, and on individualism.

Specifically, in his brief treatment of the history of thought in his great Treatise on Political Economy, Say makes no mention whatever of Cantillon. Despite the considerable influence of Turgot on his doctrine, he brusquely dismisses Turgot as sound on politics but of no account in economics, and asserts that political economy in effect began with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. This curious and wilful neglect of his own forbears is made obscure by the scandalous fact that there is not a single biography of Say in the English language, and precious little even in French.

Perhaps we can understand this development given the following. In France, economics had long been associated with the physiocrats, les économistes. The ouster from the controller-generaliship of the great Turgot in 1776 and the consequent demise of his liberal reforms served to discredit the entire physiocratic movement. For Turgot was unfortunately considered in the public eye as merely a fellow traveller of physiocracy and its most influential follower in government.

After this loss of political influence, the French philosophes and the leading intelligentsia felt free to heap mockery and ridicule on the physiocrats. Some of the fanatical cult aspects of physiocracy left it vulnerable to scorn, and the encyclopédistes, though themselves generally pro-laissez-faire, led the attack.

The advent of the French Revolution accelerated the demise of physiocracy. In the first place, the Revolution was itself too intensely political to allow much sustained interest in economic theory. Second, the physiocrats’ strategic devotion to absolute monarchy tended to discredit them in an era when the monarch had been toppled and destroyed.

Moreover, the physiocrats, with their emphasis on the exclusive productivity of land, were associated with devotion to the landed, aristocratic interest. The French Revolution against aristocratic rule and against feudal landholding had no patience for physiocracy. The impatience was aggravated by the emergence of industrialism and the Industrial Revolution, which increasingly rendered obsolete the physiocratic devotion to the land.

All these factors served to discredit physiocracy totally, and since Turgot was unfortunately identified as a physiocrat, his reputation was dragged down at the same time. This situation was aggravated by the fact that Turgot’s former aide and close friend, editor, and biographer was the last of the physiocrats, the statesman Pierre Samuel DuPont de Nemours (1739–1817), who added to the problem by deliberately distorting Turgot’s views to make them appear as close to physiocracy as possible.

. . . .

Later, in the 1790s, the physiocratic remnants latched gratefully on to the Smithian coat-tails. Smith, after all, favoured laissez-faire, and he was almost outlandishly proagriculture, holding that agricultural labour was the chief source of wealth. As a result, most of the later physiocrats became early Smithians in France, led by the Marquis Germain Garnier (1754–1821), the first French translator of the Wealth of Nations, who presented Smithian doctrine to France in his Abrégé élémentaire des principes de l’économie politique (1796).close quote (Read more)

maximum-wage law was enacted by Massachusetts as early as 1630

open quotehe first maximum-wage law was enacted by Massachusetts as early as 1630. Due to the high wages commanded by the scarcity of construction craftsmen, the law concentrated on maximum-wage rates in the building trades. Carpenters, bricklayers, etc., were limited to two shillings a day and any payment above this rate would subject both the employer and the worker to punishment (for instance, a buying-cartel of employers established by the law punished the recalcitrant employer who decided to break ranks). Almost immediately, the magistrates decided to imbibe more of the magic medicine, and legal wage rates were pushed down to 16 pence a day for master carpenters and bricklayers, and correspondingly lower for other laborers.

But the economic laws of the market made enforcement hopeless, and after only six months, the General Court repealed the laws, and ordered all wages to be “left free and at liberty as men shall reasonably agree.” But Massachusetts Bay was not to remain wise for long. By 1633 the General Court became horrified again at higher wage rates in construction and other trades and at the propensity of the working classes to rise above their supposedly appointed station in life by relaxing more and by spending their wages on luxuries. Denouncing “the great extortion … by divers persons of little conscience” and the “vain and idle waste of precious time,” the court enacted a comprehensive and detailed wage-control program.

The law of 1633 decreed a maximum of two shillings a day without board and 14 pence with board, for the wages of sawyers, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, etc. Top-rate laborers were limited to 18 pence without. These rates were approximately double those of England for skilled craftsmen and treble for unskilled laborers. Constables were to set the wages of lesser laborers. Penalties were levied on the employers and the wage earners who violated the law. Sensing that maximum controls below the market wage led to a shortage of labor, the General Court decreed that no idleness was to be permitted. In effect, minimum hours were decreed in order to bolster the maximum-wage law — another form of compulsory labor. Workmen were ordered to work “the whole day, allowing convenient time for food and rest.”

Interestingly, the General Court soon decided to make an exception for the government itself, which was naturally having difficulty finding men willing to work on its public-works projects. A combination of the carrot and the stick was used: government officials were allowed to award “such extraordinary wages as they shall judge the work to deserve.” On the other hand, they were empowered to send town constables to conscript laborers as the need arose.

Although merchants were happy to join the landed oligarchy and the Puritan zealots in forcing down the wage rates of laborers, they were scarcely as happy about maximum controls on selling prices. The gentry were eager, however, to force downward the prices of products they needed to buy. A blend of mercantilist fallacies and Puritan suspicion of commerce, the result was persistent attempts to force commodities below their market prices. Having little conception of the function of the price system on the free market, the Massachusetts authorities also felt that maximum-price control would bolster the maximum-wage-rate program. There was no understanding that general movements in prices and wages are governed by the supply of and demand for money, and that this too can best work itself out on the free market.

Corn was the major monetary medium of the North, and in 1630 Massachusetts set the sterling price of corn at six shillings per bushel. Failing to work, this control was repealed along with the wage laws of 1631, and corn was “left at liberty to be sold as men can agree.” In 1633, however, maximum-price controls were reimposed as an auxiliary to the wage controls.

The massive wage laws of 1633 were quickly discovered to be a failure; once again the quiet but powerful economic laws of the market had triumphed over the dramatic decrees of the coercive state. After one year the actual wage rates were 50 percent higher than the statutory levels. At that point, the General Court repealed the penalties against paying, but retained those against receiving, wages above the fixed legal rate. While, in fact, no employer had ever been tried or penalized under the old act, the wage law was now an open and flagrant piece of class legislation. This was nothing new, however, as there were ample precedents in English maximum-wage laws since the early 15th century.

Another change made in 1634 allowed a little flexibility in decreed prices and wages by permitting each town to alter the legal rate in case of disputes. Only a year later the General Court, despairing of the continued failure of the law to take hold, repealed the comprehensive wage controls and the auxiliary price controls. Just before this comprehensive repeal, the courts had apparently been driven by the failure to inflict ever harsher penalties; fines had been so heavy that two workers were imprisoned for failure to pay. The authorities were at the crossroads: should they begin to impose on workers violating clearly unworkable economic decrees the sort of punishment meted out to heretics or to critics of the government? Happily, common sense, in this case, finally prevailed.close quote (Read more)

Hindenburg Disaster? The government’s fault.

open quoteThe Zeppelin company originally preferred the cheaper and more readily obtainable hydrogen, but after 48 of 56 passengers on a British airship were killed in a storm in 1930, Zeppelin’s engineers planned the new design for the safer, nonflammable helium. Unfortunately for Zeppelin, Congress had passed a law in 1927 banning the export of helium because it was a strategic gas with military aviation potential. There was thus no alternative to hydrogen, despite its risks. (Interestingly, the United States lifted the ban on helium after the Hindenburg disaster, although it was reinstated in 1938 after Nazi Germany annexed Austria.)close quote (Read more)

The Fall of Communism in Massachusetts

open quoteThe Pilgrims formed a partnership in a joint-stock company with a group of London merchants, including Thomas Weston, an ironmonger, and John Peirce, a cloth maker. The company, John Peirce and Associates, received in 1620 a grant from the Virginia Company for a particular plantation in Virginia territory. In this alliance, each adult settler was granted a share in the joint-stock company, and each investment of ten pounds also received a share. At the end of seven years, the accumulated earnings were to be divided among the shareholders. Until that division, as in the original Virginia settlement, the company decreed a communistic system of production, with each settler contributing his all to the common store and each drawing his needs from it — again, a system of from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

In mid-December 1620 the Mayflower landed at Plymouth. In a duplication of the terrible hardships of the first Virginia settlers, half of the colonists were dead by the end of the first winter. In mid-1621 John Peirce and Associates obtained a patent from the Council for New England, granting the company 100 acres of land for each settler and 1,500 acres compulsorily reserved for public use. In return, the Council was to receive a yearly quitrent of two shillings per 100 acres.

A major reason for the persistent hardships, for the “starving time,” in Plymouth as before in Jamestown, was the communism imposed by the company. Finally, in order to survive, the colony in 1623 permitted each family to cultivate a small private plot of land for their individual use. William Bradford, who had become governor of Plymouth in 1621, and was to help rule the colony for 30 years thereafter, eloquently describes the result in his record of the colony:

All this while no supply was heard of.… So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length … the Governor (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves.… And so assigned to every family a parcel of land … for that end, only for present use.… This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.

The experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s … that the taking away of property and bringing community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing.… For this community … was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong … had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice.… Upon … all being to have alike, and all to do alike, they thought … one as good as another, and so … did … work diminish … the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst men.… Let none object this is men’s corruption … all men have this corruption in them.…[1]

The antipathy of communism to the nature of man here receives eloquent testimony from a governor scarcely biased a priori in favor of individualism.close quote (Read more)

CIA Claims Release of its History of the Bay of Pigs Debacle Would “Confuse the Public.”

open quote7 April 2012 UPDATE: Fifty-one years after the failed attempt to invade Cuba, the Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Justice continue to claim that releasing the final volume of a CIA history of the debacle would “confuse the public” and should therefore remain withheld. The National Security Archive originally requested the document in 2005. Last year, the Archive filed a FOIA lawsuit to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Bay of Pigs debacle. That prompted the release of three volumes of the five volume history (one volume was already available at the Johnson Presidential Library); the CIA and DOJ have continued to fight the release of the fifth volume. Judge Kessler, of the US District Court in Washington DC, is expected to soon rule on the case.

In late 2011, the Central Intelligence Agency explained to Judge Kessler of the US District Court in Washington DC that releasing the final volume of its three-decade-old history of the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle would “confuse the public,” and should be withheld because it is a “predecisional” document. Wow. And I thought that I had heard them all.close quote (Read more)