Recent content by Jaded_Railman

Just worth noting that the American Revolution really was more violent and radical than is usually portrayed. The early Revolution was, in reality, a series of civil wars in each colony and some got pretty nasty, Rhode Island is, IIRC, the only colony which didn't see a major civil war. To...

While using humorously named metaphorical countries can be useful in some instances, I believe being honest is worth it here. If 'Guntopia' is a democratic country with (as time goes on) an increasingly large electorate, it doesn't quite matter, because 'Guntopia' is going to suffer just as...

Of course they couldn't: They had to pay a relatively high price for labor vis-a-vie manufacturers in Europe. And are you saying it's a BAD thing that Britain sent cheap merchandise to the US when tariffs were lowered? Tell me, ought we be raising tariffs against China? They're doing the...

As I said, to some extent, it can't be stopped. Even the Second Serfdom wasn't completely successful, and that was a hugely more drastic measure. But the changed parameters will have some effect. You change the mix of manufacturing and agriculture in the early American economy and you change...

One of two scenarios: 1. A more 'British' America, that is, an America with much larger class divides, much earlier. Whereas, in the areas without a plantation economy, the early decades of the republic were markedly flat, just because of the influence of an open frontier. As indentured...

Because the chartering regime that dominated state banking isn't ever going to keep up with the fundamentals of the American economy at the time. The chartered banks won't be able to expand fast enough or in the correct ways, the state legislatures won't be able to charter new ones fast enough.

Believe it or not, he kind of was. That's why he was so against the bank. Actually, I think it's the fact that he understood them that made him so against the bank. How, exactly, are these things really so necessary, anyway? Anyway, what happens? Well, you know that situation we're in...

Well, there's no precise definition of 'recession and 'depression', so telling the difference between the two is more of an art than a science. Calling it the 'Great Depression' is sort of an American centric view, because it was only here that unemployment stayed above 10% for a decade...

The very first thing that could avoid it is avoiding WWI. The way governments financed WWI broke the gold standard, which made the global economy incredibly unstable. If WWI is a necessity, there are certain things that 'can' be done to avoid the Great Depression, but you're going to have...

These days, when talking about Krugman, "Krugman's wrong", is more of a truism than a claim. Anyway, a good place to start is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy And here's an article about what REALLY happened to the US economy during the war...

Yes, it is. Like most people, you seem to have this idea that racism is anything but the act of categorizing people as members of a race, rather than individuals. That idea is wrong. Is a field filled with former slave owners slaving away for the benefit of their former slaves a type of...

The economy will suffer during the course of the French Wars across the sea, but then again, the majority of Americans at this time were subsistence farmers or their hired hands. That's not as huge a problem as it would be today. Once the European war ends and export markets pick up, gold and...

I think it's more likely that people would turn against paper money. After all, Gresham's Law only holds in a situation of legal tender, and Continentals were not legal tender.

This is exactly the point I keep trying to make: Saying something 'should' or 'would' be like such and such arrangement isn't enough. I can talk about how we should live in a world without scarcity, but that doesn't help us to get there. If anarchist communes would number in the 'few...

Because, like it or not, and completely ignoring whether it's really possible or not, the transition to this kind of society would be neither quick nor painless. In fact, the two are sort of a trade-off: The quicker it happens, the more painful it is. Because of the nature of these transitions...