REACTIONARY ACADEMICS

Professors like Mankiw and Feldstein, who have a fervent belief in the Free Market Fairy, have been with us for over 100 years. In the late nineteenth century¹, most professors of economics thought the free market was God's own plan for society and this attitude has only been tempered by the diminution of the reliance on theology. This passage from an article by President Hopkins of Dartmouth College gives a sample of how the reactionaries thought of the New Deal²:

Initiative, courage, hardihood, frugality, and aspiration for self-betterment are to be penalized, and the fruits of these are to be taken from those who have undergone self-sacrifice to attain them and bestowed upon those who have never developed the qualities to possess themselves of rewards. . . . The necessity for struggle, by which men have developed strength, and the discipline of hardship, through which they have achieved greatness of mind and heart and soul, are to be replaced by a specious security.

But it is the effect of the New Deal on the imagination and aspiration of youth that I most dread. I am desperately afraid of it because it teaches young men and women to unlearn the lessons of America which school and college have striven so earnestly to teach. It encourages weakness and penalizes strength. It diffuses throughout the masses of our people the spirit of acquisitiveness which it condemns in groups of them. It punishes accomplishment and persecutes individuals and industrial enterprises alike simply on the basis of the magnitude of their achievement without regard to the social value of the imaginative and creative talent which brought them into being.(Atlantic Monthly, October, 1936.)

Let's recall that in a few years, America alone would outproduce Germany, Japan and Italy combined.

¹ see Thorstein Veblen and His America, pp. 23-25.

²The Folklore of Capitalism, p. 198