As any fule kno, Insty has put together many excellent posts during his long and storied reign as the King Of The Internet. This one is not only one of his best, but almost certainly the most timely.
The title is excellent:
FASTER, PLEASE: Unleash the entrepreneurs America needs to build a post-coronavirus economy.
The first link is good, but it’s the second link that sets the post apart from the pack, because it points to history as a way to move forward. Please read this Reason article (it’s long, but oh-so worth it), and I hope that our various gummint “leaders” read it too. (I’m not too sanguine about that, though.)
Basically, the “German Non-Miracle” is of particular interest to me because in my major of Modern European History we spent almost an entire semester studying just the period 1945-1990 in West Germany. What made the course extraordinary was that my lecturer at UNT, the peerless Dr. Alfred Mierzejewski, was not only an economic historian, but the author of the biography of the man behind West Germany’s recovery, Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard. (His other two works on the German railway system from 1920 until 1945 are, despite their dry titles, probably the most thought-provoking history books I’ve ever read. They are to the history of that period as a study of the economic implications of the Internet would be to our era.)
Needless to say, I devoured the course and read the biography (it wasn’t a set work, although it should have been), and my only wish was that it had been longer.
And for those who are Too Damn Busy to read anything longer than a few lines, here’s the executive summary of the lesson for our modern-day governments as we try to pull ourselves out of the morass of the Chinkvirus-ravaged economy:
It’s been a while since I studied the matter in any kind of depth, but IIRC, countries like the UK and ([*hawk*], [*spit*]) France took our Marshall Plan money and established lavish welfare states, while Germany and Japan got relatively little aid and went on to prosper because capitalism.
I thought Germany got the Marshall Plan Aid and the UK did not. Famously some East German newspaper printed a photo of a Marshall Plan shipment being unloaded in Hamburg or Bremen. The side of one crate had “Free Gift From America” stenciled on it. The caption in the newspaper said, “Commentar uberflussig” — Commentary Superfluous — because “Gift” in German is “Poison.”
One thing that kept the German unions and by extension Leftists in check for many years after the war was for the corporation they were negotiating with to say, “This will bring back inflation.”
The UK got not Marshall Aid, but a $5 billion loan — with which they nationalized their major industries instead of using it to rebuild. At least they repaid the loan in full, eventually.
You might note that one of Churchill’s policies for the 1950 election was the abolition of price controls and rationing, which had grown ever-more stringent and Stalinist. It still took him some years.
I wonder, how many of your American reader know that the construction “ As any fule kno” likely comes from a series of humorous books illustrated by Ronald Searle and written by Geoffrey Willians.
DOWN WITH SKOOL, HOW TO BE TOP, WHIZZ FOR ATOMMS, and BACK IN THE JUG AGAINE
Only slightly less wonderful than Searle’s solo creation, the girls of St. Trinian’s
I have The Compleet Molesworth on my bookshelf right behind me. He is my all-time hero.