Amity Shlaes: Best Speaker of the Ath Yet.

Amity Shlaes had some great one-liners tonight in her highly-informative speech addressing the New Deal. Suffice it to say, I loved every minute of it. I hope she's wrong about how the country's trending Left and how Shlaes's four children -- my generation -- are going to be the new Forgotten Man once again if entitlements aren't drastically rethought. Given the likelihood that the Baby Boomers will perpetuate the welfare state of the '30's at the expense of their own children, I can't help but shudder when I think of the future.

Here are the one liners.

On kosher laws:
"Kosher laws were a sort of medieval F.D.A."

On those who want to increase federal power:
"Basically, what you're hoping for is a Katrina."

On spending increasing from 3 percent to 9 percent of GDP:
"It's like moving to heroin after tea."

On Hitler's illusory growth of GDP:
"If at the end of the day, you kill 100,000 people in your first few months in office, how important really is GDP? "

My favorite response of all was, of course, to a question I posed about how there are so many economic ignoramuses in political power. I mentioned the bit from Shlaes's article in the Wall Street Journal about the gold standard and how FDR picked the magic number of 21 cents because of the power of seven and not for any real economic common sense. I thought that Elliott Spitzer, Governor of New York, really kept with that abysmal tradition.

Shlaes responded that politicians do not seem to understand that "you cannot legislate recovery." How refreshing! Taken to its local conclusion, we could have stopped so many of the awful acts done in the name of good in the 20th century.

Shlaes stressed how important a culture of business is and how very important economic education is.

Hear that CMC? Shlaes wants a culture of education and business. Might she be someone to consider bringing along on the grand Day adventure? The skill set she brings to the table -- journalism, literature, economics -- could be quite a rich asset indeed.

Pitzer College's Eco-Dorms Mentioned in San Diego Business Journal

You might remember that I blogged earlier about Red Redford's trip to Pitzer to inaugurate the building of new eco-friendly dorms. At the time, with it's low-flow showers and conservation of water resources I mocked it ceaselessly on the grounds that if any of the students from the 5-Cs need a shower, it's the Pitzer kids. But now I'm wondering just how much of a pretty penny it cost Pitzer.

Here's the article. (I'm still working on getting a copy of the press release.)

Carrier Johnson, a San Diego-based sustainable architecture and planning firm, announced the opening of three new “green” residence halls on Pitzer College’s campus last Friday. The college in Claremont, known to hold environmental stewardship as a core value, has gained attention from the education community, “green building” organizations, the national media and environmental leaders. Recycled materials, solar photovoltaic cells and a rainwater recycling system were used in the creation of the new halls. Four additional residence halls are in the planning stages.

I'm looking for the price tag, but it doesn't seem to be forthcoming...

Amily Shlaes Notes Before Talk

I won't confess to being particularly up-to-date about the 1930s or about most economic policy. My ignorance, at least on that subject, could fill volumes. Fortunately, Amity Shlaes's talk at Claremont McKenna may change some of that.

Nevertheless, I just read Amity Shlaes's piece in The Wall Street Journal that essentially boils down the main thrust of her The Forgotten Man. (If anyone has a copy that they would like to lend me, I would deeply appreciate it.) I absolutely love books that challenge the conventional wisdom-- especially when it's something I've long pondered.

On to Shlaes points, I was struck by the bit about the Schechter brothers, who challenged the planned codes of FDR's NRA and by the sheer insanity of some of those practices.

A think tank produced a report of 900 pages in 1935 concluding the NRA "on the whole retarded recovery" (that think tank was the Brookings Institution). Some of the great heroes of the period were the Schechter brothers, kosher butchers who fought the NRA all the way to the Supreme Court and won. Their case was not only jurisprudential but also based on common sense--management from above was killing recovery. The Schechter case is as important to history, as, say, the Gideon case that Anthony Lewis wrote about in his great book about the right to counsel, "Gideon's Trumpet." Where is the "Gideon's Trumpet" for free marketeers?

Shlaes's point is that we create these "academia shall not go there" zones in our society and that those conversations seriously impede rigorous intellectual inquiry. I can't help but notice the way she opens the conversation by gorging some of the sacred cows of left-wing orthodoxy.

The late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was a true liberal--a man who welcomed debate. Just before he died this winter, he wrote, quoting someone else, that history is an argument without end. That, Schlesinger added, "is why we love it so."

Yet concerning Schlesinger's own period of study, the 1930s, there has been curiously little argument. The American consensus is Schlesinger's consensus: that FDR saved democracy from fascism by co-opting the left and far right with his alphabet programs. Certainly, an observer might criticize various aspects of the period, but scrutiny of the New Deal edifice in its entirety is something that ought to be postponed for another era--or so we learned long ago. Indeed, to take a skeptical look at the New Deal as a whole has been considered downright immoral.

The real question about the 1930s is not whether it is wrong to scrutinize the New Deal.

Why does it take so long to examine controversial subjects? Might it be that tenure rewards only the head nodding and not the free exercise of the mind?

I'm going to be blogging about this later on, after the talk with Salvatori fellows and later with the Ath dinner.