Geoffrey recently warned of the perils of centralized innovation. In contradistinction to that very warning, I came across this footnote (chapter 14, footnote 3) in Friedrich A. Hayek’s famous ‘The Road to Serfdom‘:
The case of the alleged suppression of useful patents is more complicated and cannot be adequately discussed in a note; but the conditions in which it would be profitable to put into cold storage a patent which in the social interest ought to be used are so exceptional that it is more than doubtful whether this has happened in any important instance. [emphasis in original]
In Hayek’s favor, there was no internet or WikiLeaks back then (but then again, perhaps that was AT&T’s fault!)
In an amusing exchange, Edmund Morris, probably best known to educated Americans as a biographer of Ronald Reagan, went nuts when braindead fourth-rate pundits Bob Schieffer and Arianna Huffington kept asking him idiotic questions about how various long-dead historical figures would feel about current events in America. Morris rightly thought the whole thing was stupid and said so, using the F word.
He then went on a diatribe about how Americans are lazy and obese:
Morris went on to criticize the American people, who he said “are insensitive to foreign sensibilities, who are lazy, obese, complacent and increasingly perplexed as to why we are losing our place in the world to people who are more dynamic than us and more disciplined.”
Knowing Morris, I highly doubt these comments stem from any kind of Menckenian individualism. Rather, I suspect that Morris is one of those war-crazed neocon types who thinks that various iron-fisted militarists like the British imperials and the Spartans should be emulated. Hence, the stuff about “discipline.”
So the whole exchange just helps to illustrate that shows like “Face the Nation” or “Meet the Press” are a complete waste of time. Who watches these shows? I mean, other than octogenarians?
But to answer the question posed to Morris: ““What would Teddy Roosevelt think of today’s politics, Edmund?””
I can channel ol’ Teddy for you right now and tell you what he would say were he to survey the political scene in America:
Wow, America has really gone down hill since I died. I can’t believe that you people let Negroes hold public office! For shame. Also, someone told me that you let the dusky races of Central America have nominal control over my great Panama Canal. The first think you should do is whip those coolies into shape and take that back. In fact, I hear there are Chinamen in warships patrolling those waters. If you’re not careful, Anglo-Saxons won’t rule the world. I shudder to think of such a world. And worse, I heard that eugenics has fallen out of favor in America. How are you supposed to wipe out the undesirables if you don’t forcibly sterilize all the weak and the Colored people?
For decades, some elements of the Right (occasionally abetted by people who should have known better) have peddled the notion that Mexico has created a vast and well-organized “fifth column” within the United States dedicated to La Reconquista — the re-conquest of territories seized by the U.S. during the Mexican-American War. In this scenario, non-assimilated Mexicans by the millions are stealthily enlisting in a campaign of subversion orchestrated by the Mexican government with the help of foundation-funded anti-American groups on this side of the border — and, when the time is right, this fifth column will erupt in an orgy of violence and mayhem.
Whatever revanchist sentiments may exist in Mexico are the residue of Washington’s seizure of roughly half the country through a war of aggression. Washington’s proxy narco-war, which has killed tens of thousands of people since 2006 and displaced hundreds of thousands more, has done nothing to palliate those feelings. An actual U.S. invasion might be the only thing that would turn the alarmist fantasy of a nationalistic uprising on the part of Mexicans living on the U.S. side of the border into something akin to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Since 2007, when the Fed’s most recent economic bubble collapsed, immigration from Mexico has tapered off dramatically. In Arizona, immigration (both legal and illegal) and violent crime have both been in decline for a decade. Yet the state’s Republican leadership, and much of its law enforcement apparatus — from Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the corrupt septuagenarian headline whore, to Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeau, his younger and more telegenic understudy — insist that the state is under unremitting siege. Governor Jan Brewer, who claimed that the “majority” of illegal immigrants from Mexico are “mules” in the employ of drug cartels and that illegal immigrants had committed “beheadings” in Arizona, was headed for electoral oblivion following an unpopular tax increase — until she seized on the immigration issue, which propelled her to a dramatic political recovery.
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