His biggest misstake being the budget balancing in 1937 that immediatly sent the country into a second recession.
Obviously balancing a budget can't send a country into a recession in itself (or the US would have been in a recession in 1998). Raising taxes or reducing spending might. As it happens, Congress passed the Undistributed Profits Tax in 1936.
There are other competing theories on 1937: the Fed doubled bank reserve requirements in 1937; scary talk by FDR in April, 1937; the economy feeling the full effect of the Social Security and Federal unemployment payroll taxes that came into force in 1936. Perhaps they all played a roll.
The infrastructure developed from the New Deal provided a tangible product which could be openly used by other segments of the economy and benefited far more. Roads affected the Automotive Industry and eventually the suburban sprawl and housing.
New Deal spending is actually a lot less than people generally think. Federal spending peaked at 8% of GDP during 1933-1941, whereas today it is over double that number (20%) while both state and local spending are both themselves are today over 8% of GDP.
The New Deal was more about dollar devaluation and regulation rather than spending.
As each country implemented Keynesian policies, their economies quickly recovered. The US was just one of the last to join the party.
Do you have good stats on that (say percent of GDP spent by government versus recovery time)?
Another point is that the US was one of the last countries to leave the Gold Standard, and that countries that left earlier tended to do better as well. I believe there was a lot of damage done by the contractionary "speculation busting" US monetary regime from 1929-1933.
There are no mainstream free-market Austrian economists anymore
I don't know what you mean by this, but every economist still reads Mises and Hayek, and I haven't seen someone refute the Socialist Calculation problem identified by Hayek. There are minor differences between Monetarists and Austrians (and the more honest of both sides agree that inflation is a monetary issue but that can also inter-react with distortionary over-investment in sectors).
The Austrians are actually claiming that the housing bubble during a time of otherwise low inflation is proof of the Austrian Business Cycle versus Monetarist/Chicago business cycle models.
WW2 was the New Deal on steroids. The Government quite literally quadrupled spending and took full control of the economy, even to the point of regulating wages and dictating output.
WW2 "fixed" the unemployment problem by putting millions of American men to work at gunpoint (the draft).
WW2 also enhanced the US export market by destroying the main competition, Western Europe (of course, pre-war trade was destroyed by the Depression-era global trade war).
WW2 ended "regime uncertainty" in the United States with the death of FDR and the realization that Communism was the enemy, and not a good potential idea for the US. Pre-war polls of businesspeople revealed that they were very worried of a fascist/communist regime coming to power in the US, which probably reduced US private investment.
Private spending did not return to pre-1929 levels until several years after WW2 was over, mind you.
FDR did one thing right - ending the contractionary "speculation busting" Fed monetary policy of 1929-1933 (through the gold clause ban and dollar devalution). Much of the rest of his efforts were anti-growth, as revealed by the recession of 1937-1938 after the initial recovery began slowly in 1933.
What are the odds the US Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is federally funded?
The IEEE is an international non-profit, professional organization for the advancement of technology (including standardizing Ethernet and WiFi, publishing leading electrical engineering research publications, etc.). It has the most members of any technical professional organization in the world, with more than 365,000 members in around 150 countries.
You can read about their sources of income here. Most money comes from conference fees, individual memberships, and journal subscriptions. I don't think they get very much money directly from any government.
You can not explain Ghandi in free market terms, nor Hitler
You may want to read up on the Salt March which was against the British tax on salt, and lead to mass civil disobedience.
Hitler's rise to power was largely powered by the forces of the global Great Depression. The number of Nazi seats in the Reichstag rose from 12 in 1928 to 230 in July 1932.
The NTSC color standard was mandated by the FCC. It was developed to be 100% compatible with monochrome sets,
And this is why we have 23.97 fps video, aka "drop frame timcode." The 3.58 MHz color subcarrier would absorb common-phase noise from the harmonics of the existing B&W line scan frequency. Rather than adjusting the audio or chroma subcarriers, they adjusted everything else, including the frame rate, which was set to 30×1.000/1.001 ~= 23.97 fps.
Drop-frame timecode has been the bane of broadcasters and video producers ever since! It even survives into the digital television world (as in 720p59.97) because it is too hard to engineer out.
Signal reception is also iffy compared to good old NTSC. They could have made a much better standard.
I'd argue that it is much easier to receive a high-quality video signal with ATSC than NTSC (as long as you are stationary). However it is true that you can receive a low-quality (fuzzy) NTSC signal easier than a low-quality ATSC signal, because there is no such thing as a low-quality ATSC signal, just dropped data.
It is possible that ATSC could have been done as a multi-resolution & multi-modulation mechanism so that low-quality reception of a less aggressive modulation was available at lower signal-to-noise levels, and you'd get an improved signal if you could receive the more aggressive modulation. It would waste bits though, and ATSC had to fit into the existing 6 MHz channels during the analog transition period (perhaps the bandwidth should have been variable as well, but then you'd make the analog-to-digital channel hop-scotch even more challenging).
But keep in mind ATSC was developed in 1994, and back then an MPEG-2 HD encoder was barely a prototype, and high-bitrate digital RF modulation was at a very early time (the first MPEG-1 digital satellite products created only around 1990). Only in 1998 was there the first productized HD MPEG-2 encoder.
ATSC PSIP is horrible - one of those things we figured out once we tried to actually do it.
New rolllout of more expensive set top boxes that use digital so now more bandwidth can be allocated to delivering on demand programming(a nice cash cow) and an excuse to raise fees.
My impression is that cable MSOs are unable to lose their analog tiers because they want the users to pay the capital for upgrading to digital boxes. Thus, as long as there are cheap people hanging on to their original analog decoder boxes, and until the MSOs are so rich they can blow the money on digital boxes, the cable analog tiers will remain.
The wasted cable bandwidth of analog is amazing. Every 6 MHz analog channel could handle 10 MPEG-4 SD channels or 3 MPEG-4 HD channels (and probably even more by "cable standards", but as a broadcast engineer I try not to encourage crappy video:)
These non-trivial changes were done without breaking backward compatibility with the original standard, not because of government protection, but because of market forces.
To be honest, the development of what we know today as CEA-608 (previously EIA-608) Closed Captioning was a private-public partnership, started in 1970 between the National Bureau of Standards and ABC. Then the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare provided funding to the engineering department of PBS starting in 1973 to finalize the work (including developing captioning consoles and caption inserters). Further HEW funding lead to the creation of the National Captioning Institute which provided a good deal of the Closed Captioning work out there.
Finally, the FCC mandated that broadcasters caption all new content, ramping up the number of required caption hours between 1998 and 2006, so that after 2006 all new content must be captioned, and currently 75% of all content produced before 1998 must be captioned as well.
Stereo TV (MTS aka BTSC) was pretty much the same as the previously-developed Zenith VHF/FM radio stereo technology where a suppressed-carrier AM subcarrier carries the 'difference' signal.
DTV in the US began as a government desire to be competitive with Japan (based on demonstrations of Japanese HDTVs to Ronald Reagan). Then broadcasters saw it as a way to secure their bandwidth in an ever-converging world, but later broadcasters realized that the change would cost a lot of money (at least $5 billion spent by broadcasters already if not more) and were a bit surprised.
there seemed to be this "emergency broadcast system" a ways back. Wonder if it still works.
The Emergency Alert System has superseded the EBS, and it remains functional in the world of DTV. Ironically though, much of the system depends on analog broadcast radio stations to get messages to television stations. There is work underway to provide emergency messaging by XML.
I was sitting next to someone with a Kindle on a plane last week, so the digital paper thing is moving fast.
Rotational storage is not going away anytime soon (who though we'd have Terabyte drives?), but you certainly my iPhone can do a heck of a lot of computing with just Flash.
The biggest problem with those creating financial instruments from home loans is that no one tested their models with systemic housing price decreases.
Economist Arnold Kling said that many years ago, Freddie Mac actually did "stress testing" of their portfolios under a 20% systemic real estate market downturn, but during the early 2000's they abandoned this technique.
CDOs did a good job of reducing the risk of early repayment and "random" defaults on mortgages. However it ended up concentrating the risk for a systemic market downturn.
Unfortunately, I am sure that some time in the future there will be another huge systemic risk that both government and the private sector will miss and we'll get hit again. The only thing we can do is keep economic freedom high in the period in-between to allow the economy to restructure (less jobs in building, more in health care, for example) in order to return to growth.
i also wouldn't say that economics is the reason why we live better today than in the past--quite the contrary actually. social/cultural progress, scientific/technological progress, medical progress, etc. have all improved living conditions for society at large. better ways of accumulating wealth has, in contrast, only improved the quality of life of a rich minority while creating greater socioeconomic inequality that has harmed most of the population.
All of the current scientific/technological/cultural progress has occurred only because of free markets. That is what kids need to know.
You'll have to explain how everyone getting richer, although perhaps unequally, has harmed the population. Perhaps you would prefer the 1950's when half of the US did not have indoor plumbing, when the poor did not have microwaves, cars, and Internet access, etc.
Who are these people? Who is judging their quality of life? Did they have advanced medical technologies? Access to Slashdot? And you call that life???!?!?
The market did nothing. The taxi drivers didn't change their fares for any economic reasons, but out of sympathy and support.
Markets are complex things. We don't know why the private sector taxis tried to match the bus prices. It is possible it was for sympathy and support. It may also have been as an investment in future goodwill.
Or the taxi drivers may have decided that there was a new market segment of lower priced riders that previously took the bus. The new riders could have increased taxi ridership volume so much that they could lower the ride price. If you go from five rides per day to 12 rides per day, you can cut your price in half and still come out ahead.
I suspect the taxi drivers would not have lowered their prices if they could not survive in doing so, or else they would have gone out of business.
But the important point is that government stepped in to over-regulate the private sector, just as they had by passing the initial laws against mixed race bussing.
Amtrak is a for-profit corporation created by Congress in the Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970 and incorporated in the District of Columbia in 1971, assuming the common carrier obligations of the private railroads (which found passenger service to be generally unprofitable) in exchange for the right to priority access of their tracks for incremental cost. Its preferred stock is owned by the U.S. federal government, but its common stock is owned by railroads that contributed capital and equipment to its formation.
(Of course, Amtrak has never actually turned a profit...)
Out of curiosity, what has been the ethnicity of the majority of airplane hijackers in the US over the past 40 years or so?
Muslims - but between 1968 and 2008 there have been the following types of airplane hijackers as well: Sikhs, Chinese, Japanese, Philippine, German, Croatian, Russian, Ethiopian (not sure if muslim), American, and Czech (according to Wikipedia).
For example, in 1994, FedEx Flight 705 hijacked by disgruntled employee Auburn Calloway as it left Memphis, Tennessee, with the intention of using it as a cruise missile against FedEx HQ. He was subdued by the flight crew before an emergency landing back at Memphis.
Actually I beg to differ. I would say they acted exactly like human beings. Probably the main reason a completely free market will fail.
They were acting like human beings in an over-regulated market. Montgomery City Lines were following the law, and risking conviction if they did not, Title 48, 301(31a, b, c), Code of Alabama of 1940:
" 301(31a). Separate accommodations for white and colored races. -- All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races, but such accommodations for the races shall be equal. All motor transportation companies or operators of vehicles carrying passengers for hire in this state, whether intrastate or interstate passengers, shall at all times provide equal but separate accommodations on each vehicle for the white and colored races. The conductor or agent of the motor transportation company in charge of any vehicle is authorized and required to assign each passenger to the division of the vehicle designated for the race to which the passenger belongs; and, if the passenger refuses to occupy the division to which he is assigned, the conductor or agent may refuse to carry the passenger on the vehicle; and, for such refusal, neither the conductor or agent of the motor transportation company nor the motor transportation company shall be liable in damages. Any motor transportation company or person violating the provisions of this section shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and, upon conviction, shall be fined not more than five hundred dollars for each offense; and each day's violation of this section shall constitute a separate offense."
This was eventually found to be unconstitutional in Browder v. Gayle 142 F. Supp. 707 (1956).
According to Wikipedia "Black taxi drivers charged ten cents per ride, a fare equal to the cost to ride the bus, in support of the boycott. When word of this reached city officials on December 8, 1955, the order went out to fine any cab driver who charged a rider less than 45 cents."
So the market tried to solve the problem, but they were over-regulated!
To date, the only effective government mechanism to help the economy in a time of recession has been monetary policy (such as FDR's devaluation or Paul Volker's fight against stagflation).
There is no evidence that fiscal spending stimulus has ever been effective in helping the economy.
Christina Romer, Obama's pick to chair the Council for Economic Advisors, has done research that shows that tax cuts can provide some short-term help to the economy.
So for short-term help to reduce joblessness, I suggest lowering taxes on jobs, the payroll tax. This could be paid for with an offsetting carbon tax. By keeping the tax cuts general and not targeted, it would allow the economy to properly shift jobs and resources to where they are actually needed for economic growth instead of where lobbyists think they should go.
I think it is important that we stick to evidence-based economics rather than what "feels good", otherwise we will end up with the economic equivalent of creationism.
It was mostly after *foreign* governments were briefly a major consumer of goods and raw materials.
The Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906, mostly based on domestic patent medicine issues and domestic meat production fear brought on by Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle".
i think it's definitely time for the public education system to update its K-12 curriculum. personally i'd also add philosophy/logic/ethics to middle school and high school curricula
How about Economics, so kids can learn how wealth is generated and why we live better today than we did 1000 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
His biggest misstake being the budget balancing in 1937 that immediatly sent the country into a second recession.
Obviously balancing a budget can't send a country into a recession in itself (or the US would have been in a recession in 1998). Raising taxes or reducing spending might. As it happens, Congress passed the Undistributed Profits Tax in 1936.
There are other competing theories on 1937: the Fed doubled bank reserve requirements in 1937; scary talk by FDR in April, 1937; the economy feeling the full effect of the Social Security and Federal unemployment payroll taxes that came into force in 1936. Perhaps they all played a roll.
The infrastructure developed from the New Deal provided a tangible product which could be openly used by other segments of the economy and benefited far more. Roads affected the Automotive Industry and eventually the suburban sprawl and housing.
It should be noted that the Interstate Highway System was not started until 1956.
The CCC improved roads in public parks. The WPA did pave or repair 300,000 miles of road, but keep in mind the US currently has 3.9 million miles of highway.
New Deal spending is actually a lot less than people generally think. Federal spending peaked at 8% of GDP during 1933-1941, whereas today it is over double that number (20%) while both state and local spending are both themselves are today over 8% of GDP.
The New Deal was more about dollar devaluation and regulation rather than spending.
As each country implemented Keynesian policies, their economies quickly recovered. The US was just one of the last to join the party.
Do you have good stats on that (say percent of GDP spent by government versus recovery time)?
Another point is that the US was one of the last countries to leave the Gold Standard, and that countries that left earlier tended to do better as well. I believe there was a lot of damage done by the contractionary "speculation busting" US monetary regime from 1929-1933.
There are no mainstream free-market Austrian economists anymore
I don't know what you mean by this, but every economist still reads Mises and Hayek, and I haven't seen someone refute the Socialist Calculation problem identified by Hayek. There are minor differences between Monetarists and Austrians (and the more honest of both sides agree that inflation is a monetary issue but that can also inter-react with distortionary over-investment in sectors).
The Austrians are actually claiming that the housing bubble during a time of otherwise low inflation is proof of the Austrian Business Cycle versus Monetarist/Chicago business cycle models.
Here are six Austrian economists and also the Review of Austrian Economics.
WW2 was the New Deal on steroids. The Government quite literally quadrupled spending and took full control of the economy, even to the point of regulating wages and dictating output.
WW2 "fixed" the unemployment problem by putting millions of American men to work at gunpoint (the draft).
WW2 also enhanced the US export market by destroying the main competition, Western Europe (of course, pre-war trade was destroyed by the Depression-era global trade war).
WW2 ended "regime uncertainty" in the United States with the death of FDR and the realization that Communism was the enemy, and not a good potential idea for the US. Pre-war polls of businesspeople revealed that they were very worried of a fascist/communist regime coming to power in the US, which probably reduced US private investment.
Private spending did not return to pre-1929 levels until several years after WW2 was over, mind you.
FDR did one thing right - ending the contractionary "speculation busting" Fed monetary policy of 1929-1933 (through the gold clause ban and dollar devalution). Much of the rest of his efforts were anti-growth, as revealed by the recession of 1937-1938 after the initial recovery began slowly in 1933.
Who the hell uses that much electric power?
His other hobby is recycling aluminum.
But that's only when he isn't smelting aluminum from bauxite using the Hall-Héroult process :)
Just get an iPhone with the biggest data plan they offer. Seriously.
I don't know where the "Semester at Sea" goes, but if you start roaming outside the US your iPhone bills are going to be super-massive!!!!!
What are the odds the US Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is federally funded?
The IEEE is an international non-profit, professional organization for the advancement of technology (including standardizing Ethernet and WiFi, publishing leading electrical engineering research publications, etc.). It has the most members of any technical professional organization in the world, with more than 365,000 members in around 150 countries.
You can read about their sources of income here. Most money comes from conference fees, individual memberships, and journal subscriptions. I don't think they get very much money directly from any government.
You can not explain Ghandi in free market terms, nor Hitler
You may want to read up on the Salt March which was against the British tax on salt, and lead to mass civil disobedience.
Hitler's rise to power was largely powered by the forces of the global Great Depression. The number of Nazi seats in the Reichstag rose from 12 in 1928 to 230 in July 1932.
The NTSC color standard was mandated by the FCC. It was developed to be 100% compatible with monochrome sets,
And this is why we have 23.97 fps video, aka "drop frame timcode." The 3.58 MHz color subcarrier would absorb common-phase noise from the harmonics of the existing B&W line scan frequency. Rather than adjusting the audio or chroma subcarriers, they adjusted everything else, including the frame rate, which was set to 30×1.000/1.001 ~= 23.97 fps.
Drop-frame timecode has been the bane of broadcasters and video producers ever since! It even survives into the digital television world (as in 720p59.97) because it is too hard to engineer out.
Signal reception is also iffy compared to good old NTSC. They could have made a much better standard.
I'd argue that it is much easier to receive a high-quality video signal with ATSC than NTSC (as long as you are stationary). However it is true that you can receive a low-quality (fuzzy) NTSC signal easier than a low-quality ATSC signal, because there is no such thing as a low-quality ATSC signal, just dropped data.
It is possible that ATSC could have been done as a multi-resolution & multi-modulation mechanism so that low-quality reception of a less aggressive modulation was available at lower signal-to-noise levels, and you'd get an improved signal if you could receive the more aggressive modulation. It would waste bits though, and ATSC had to fit into the existing 6 MHz channels during the analog transition period (perhaps the bandwidth should have been variable as well, but then you'd make the analog-to-digital channel hop-scotch even more challenging).
But keep in mind ATSC was developed in 1994, and back then an MPEG-2 HD encoder was barely a prototype, and high-bitrate digital RF modulation was at a very early time (the first MPEG-1 digital satellite products created only around 1990). Only in 1998 was there the first productized HD MPEG-2 encoder.
ATSC PSIP is horrible - one of those things we figured out once we tried to actually do it.
New rolllout of more expensive set top boxes that use digital so now more bandwidth can be allocated to delivering on demand programming(a nice cash cow) and an excuse to raise fees.
My impression is that cable MSOs are unable to lose their analog tiers because they want the users to pay the capital for upgrading to digital boxes. Thus, as long as there are cheap people hanging on to their original analog decoder boxes, and until the MSOs are so rich they can blow the money on digital boxes, the cable analog tiers will remain.
The wasted cable bandwidth of analog is amazing. Every 6 MHz analog channel could handle 10 MPEG-4 SD channels or 3 MPEG-4 HD channels (and probably even more by "cable standards", but as a broadcast engineer I try not to encourage crappy video :)
These non-trivial changes were done without breaking backward compatibility with the original standard, not because of government protection, but because of market forces.
To be honest, the development of what we know today as CEA-608 (previously EIA-608) Closed Captioning was a private-public partnership, started in 1970 between the National Bureau of Standards and ABC. Then the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare provided funding to the engineering department of PBS starting in 1973 to finalize the work (including developing captioning consoles and caption inserters). Further HEW funding lead to the creation of the National Captioning Institute which provided a good deal of the Closed Captioning work out there.
Finally, the FCC mandated that broadcasters caption all new content, ramping up the number of required caption hours between 1998 and 2006, so that after 2006 all new content must be captioned, and currently 75% of all content produced before 1998 must be captioned as well.
Stereo TV (MTS aka BTSC) was pretty much the same as the previously-developed Zenith VHF/FM radio stereo technology where a suppressed-carrier AM subcarrier carries the 'difference' signal.
DTV in the US began as a government desire to be competitive with Japan (based on demonstrations of Japanese HDTVs to Ronald Reagan). Then broadcasters saw it as a way to secure their bandwidth in an ever-converging world, but later broadcasters realized that the change would cost a lot of money (at least $5 billion spent by broadcasters already if not more) and were a bit surprised.
there seemed to be this "emergency broadcast system" a ways back. Wonder if it still works.
The Emergency Alert System has superseded the EBS, and it remains functional in the world of DTV. Ironically though, much of the system depends on analog broadcast radio stations to get messages to television stations. There is work underway to provide emergency messaging by XML.
I was sitting next to someone with a Kindle on a plane last week, so the digital paper thing is moving fast.
Rotational storage is not going away anytime soon (who though we'd have Terabyte drives?), but you certainly my iPhone can do a heck of a lot of computing with just Flash.
The biggest problem with those creating financial instruments from home loans is that no one tested their models with systemic housing price decreases.
Economist Arnold Kling said that many years ago, Freddie Mac actually did "stress testing" of their portfolios under a 20% systemic real estate market downturn, but during the early 2000's they abandoned this technique.
CDOs did a good job of reducing the risk of early repayment and "random" defaults on mortgages. However it ended up concentrating the risk for a systemic market downturn.
Unfortunately, I am sure that some time in the future there will be another huge systemic risk that both government and the private sector will miss and we'll get hit again. The only thing we can do is keep economic freedom high in the period in-between to allow the economy to restructure (less jobs in building, more in health care, for example) in order to return to growth.
i also wouldn't say that economics is the reason why we live better today than in the past--quite the contrary actually. social/cultural progress, scientific/technological progress, medical progress, etc. have all improved living conditions for society at large. better ways of accumulating wealth has, in contrast, only improved the quality of life of a rich minority while creating greater socioeconomic inequality that has harmed most of the population.
All of the current scientific/technological/cultural progress has occurred only because of free markets. That is what kids need to know.
You'll have to explain how everyone getting richer, although perhaps unequally, has harmed the population. Perhaps you would prefer the 1950's when half of the US did not have indoor plumbing, when the poor did not have microwaves, cars, and Internet access, etc.
Who are these people? Who is judging their quality of life? Did they have advanced medical technologies? Access to Slashdot? And you call that life???!?!?
The market did nothing. The taxi drivers didn't change their fares for any economic reasons, but out of sympathy and support.
Markets are complex things. We don't know why the private sector taxis tried to match the bus prices. It is possible it was for sympathy and support. It may also have been as an investment in future goodwill.
Or the taxi drivers may have decided that there was a new market segment of lower priced riders that previously took the bus. The new riders could have increased taxi ridership volume so much that they could lower the ride price. If you go from five rides per day to 12 rides per day, you can cut your price in half and still come out ahead.
I suspect the taxi drivers would not have lowered their prices if they could not survive in doing so, or else they would have gone out of business.
But the important point is that government stepped in to over-regulate the private sector, just as they had by passing the initial laws against mixed race bussing.
Amtrak is a for-profit corporation created by Congress in the Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970 and incorporated in the District of Columbia in 1971, assuming the common carrier obligations of the private railroads (which found passenger service to be generally unprofitable) in exchange for the right to priority access of their tracks for incremental cost. Its preferred stock is owned by the U.S. federal government, but its common stock is owned by railroads that contributed capital and equipment to its formation.
(Of course, Amtrak has never actually turned a profit...)
Out of curiosity, what has been the ethnicity of the majority of airplane hijackers in the US over the past 40 years or so?
Muslims - but between 1968 and 2008 there have been the following types of airplane hijackers as well: Sikhs, Chinese, Japanese, Philippine, German, Croatian, Russian, Ethiopian (not sure if muslim), American, and Czech (according to Wikipedia).
For example, in 1994, FedEx Flight 705 hijacked by disgruntled employee Auburn Calloway as it left Memphis, Tennessee, with the intention of using it as a cruise missile against FedEx HQ. He was subdued by the flight crew before an emergency landing back at Memphis.
Actually I beg to differ. I would say they acted exactly like human beings. Probably the main reason a completely free market will fail.
They were acting like human beings in an over-regulated market. Montgomery City Lines were following the law, and risking conviction if they did not, Title 48, 301(31a, b, c), Code of Alabama of 1940:
" 301(31a). Separate accommodations for white and colored races. -- All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races, but such accommodations for the races shall be equal. All motor transportation companies or operators of vehicles carrying passengers for hire in this state, whether intrastate or interstate passengers, shall at all times provide equal but separate accommodations on each vehicle for the white and colored races. The conductor or agent of the motor transportation company in charge of any vehicle is authorized and required to assign each passenger to the division of the vehicle designated for the race to which the passenger belongs; and, if the passenger refuses to occupy the division to which he is assigned, the conductor or agent may refuse to carry the passenger on the vehicle; and, for such refusal, neither the conductor or agent of the motor transportation company nor the motor transportation company shall be liable in damages. Any motor transportation company or person violating the provisions of this section shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and, upon conviction, shall be fined not more than five hundred dollars for each offense; and each day's violation of this section shall constitute a separate offense."
This was eventually found to be unconstitutional in Browder v. Gayle 142 F. Supp. 707 (1956).
According to Wikipedia "Black taxi drivers charged ten cents per ride, a fare equal to the cost to ride the bus, in support of the boycott. When word of this reached city officials on December 8, 1955, the order went out to fine any cab driver who charged a rider less than 45 cents."
So the market tried to solve the problem, but they were over-regulated!
To date, the only effective government mechanism to help the economy in a time of recession has been monetary policy (such as FDR's devaluation or Paul Volker's fight against stagflation).
There is no evidence that fiscal spending stimulus has ever been effective in helping the economy.
Christina Romer, Obama's pick to chair the Council for Economic Advisors, has done research that shows that tax cuts can provide some short-term help to the economy.
So for short-term help to reduce joblessness, I suggest lowering taxes on jobs, the payroll tax. This could be paid for with an offsetting carbon tax. By keeping the tax cuts general and not targeted, it would allow the economy to properly shift jobs and resources to where they are actually needed for economic growth instead of where lobbyists think they should go.
I think it is important that we stick to evidence-based economics rather than what "feels good", otherwise we will end up with the economic equivalent of creationism.
It was mostly after *foreign* governments were briefly a major consumer of goods and raw materials.
The Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906, mostly based on domestic patent medicine issues and domestic meat production fear brought on by Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle".
i think it's definitely time for the public education system to update its K-12 curriculum. personally i'd also add philosophy/logic/ethics to middle school and high school curricula
How about Economics, so kids can learn how wealth is generated and why we live better today than we did 1000 years ago.