The Unbroken Window

(wintercow: This is part 2 of a series from guest blogger Michael Marotta). Detroit was unimportant when the Federal Reserve Board was created in 1912.  Federal Reserve Banks were established in Cleveland and Chicago, also both St. Louis and Kansas City; but, like the entire West between Dallas and San Francisco, Michigan was still an economic [...]

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(wintercow: I have asked Michael Marotta to put together a few posts on his observations from living in Michigan, this is part 1 of a 2 part series) Every Labor Day since 1961, several thousand Michiganders walk across the Mackinac (rhymes with Saginaw; honest) Bridge that ties the “U.P.” (Upper Peninsula) with the “Mitten” (Lower [...]

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The Start of the Great Depression by Michael E. Marotta (This presentation originally appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of the Mich-Matist of the Michigan State Numismatic Society.) No mythology faces fewer challenges than the folktale of The Great Depression.  The Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, pointed out in Human Action that capitalists and socialists [...]

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Would the passage of such a law imply that the reverse were acceptable? I got to thinking about it because this is indeed how many people interpret the Constitution. Article 1, Section 8 outlines the things that Congress may explicitly do. Article 1, Section 10 outlines the things that the state legislators may not do [...]

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One of the major myths of the “high school” version of the causes of the Great Depression is that the 1920s was a period of false prosperity, and it was the excessive dependence on consumer credit which ultimately led to “overconsumption” for which we suffered the hangover for during the 1930s. Ironically, this gets the [...]

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Episode 1: The Dawn of the Progressive Era In 1890 the US passed the Sherman Antitrust act, which had as its goal the elimination of monopolies or attempts to monopolize. This was the dawn of the Progressive Era (needless to say, this act was passed on behalf of big business, don’t like your HS history [...]

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In 1936, the fledgling Social Security Board sent a document to millions of Americans that read (from Chapter 9 of Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man): There is now a law in this country which will give about 26 million people something to live on when they are old and have stopped working. … (the government [...]

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the classical gold standard. This was an international monetary standard that lasted from roughly 1870 to 1914. Not perhaps coincidentally, this was a time of a vast expansion in trade (the first modern wave of globalization) and a general surge in global prosperity. Without getting into the details, [...]

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For a very long time people in the professional practice of medicine have both subtly and openly resisted changes that would cut into their own profitability and share of the “market.” This is natural. But medical professionals have a particularly useful tool to make their case to the public and to legislators — the health [...]

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The only memory I have of my $100,000+ education is a small seminar I took with the then President of the College, Peter Pouncey. I was totally lost and clueless about much of anything we read and discussed. But I knew it was important stuff. Indeed, my most vivid memory was a class where we [...]

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