On August 16, 1841, U.S. President John Tyler vetoed a bill to re-establish the Second Bank of the United States (pictured). Enraged Whig Party members — feeling betrayed by the WINO* Tyler — rioted outside the White House in history’s most violent demonstration on White House grounds.
* “Whig In Name Only,” anachronistic joke term. A play on the contemporary initialisms “Republican in Name Only” (RINO) and “Democrat in Name Only” (DINO).
On a sad August 15 in 1971, President Richard Nixon removed the last vestiges of the once-great bulwark of capitalism, America’s adherence to the international gold standard, ending convertibility of the United States dollar into gold by foreign investors. The dollar has remained fiat money ever since, but did not succeed in retaining its previous value.
But then, the dollar under the previous quasi-gold, Bretton-Woods Agreement wasn’t stable either, which is why Nixon had to close the gold window.
[T]he misguided people are rushing into a horrible and absurd struggle, in which victory would be more fatal than defeat; since, according to this supposition, the result would be the realisation of universal evils, the destruction of every means of emancipation, the consummation of its own misery.
Frédéric Bastiat, “Capital and Interest” in Essays on Political Economy (New York:
G. P. Putnams & Sons, 1874). Bastiat is referring to the anti-capitalist ideas of “MM. Proudhon and Thoré” who, he argued, were “deceiving themselves” as well as the people.
Pierre Joseph Proudhon was the first person on record to call himself an “anarchist” and regard it as a good thing, and the first to call the owner of property a “capitalist.” He is known for a number of works promoting “mutualism,” including Systems of Economical Contradictions, or; The Philosophy of Misery, which was translated into English by Benjamin R. Tucker. Étienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré (better known as Théophile Thoré-Bürger) was a journalist and art critic now known mostly as the re-discroverer of the paintings of Vermeer. Among his writings was La Recherche de la liberté of 1845.
On August 14, 1765, Sam Adams led the first rebel mob against enforcers of the Stamp Act in Britain’s American colonies.
On this day in 1980, Lech Wałęsa led strikes at the Gdańsk, Poland, shipyards.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
Another riot, more violence, one person dead. What to make of it all?
Click on over to Townhall for the question (if not the answer) of the day.
On August 13, 1831, Nat Turner witnessed a solar eclipse, which he interpreted as a sign from God. Eight days later he and 70 other slaves killed approximately 55 whites in Southampton County, Virginia.
Government is not maimed, and cannot be so. It has two hands — one to receive and the other to give; in other words, it has a rough hand and a smooth one. The activity of the second is necessarily subordinate to the activity of the first. Strictly, Government may take and not restore. This is evident, and may be explained by the porous and absorbing nature of its hands, which always retain a part, and sometimes the whole, of what they touch. But the thing that never was seen, and never will be seen or conceived, is, that Government can restore more to the public than it has taken from it. It is therefore ridiculous for us to appear before it in the humble attitude of beggars. It is radically impossible for it to confer a particular benefit upon any one of the individualities which constitute the community, without inflicting a greater injury upon the community as a whole.
Frédéric Bastiat, “Government” in Essays on Political Economy (New York:
G. P. Putnams & Sons, 1874)
The big news this week has been the “Google Memo” scandal, which ended up with the firing of its author, James Damore. He gave several interviews after getting the sack, most prominent being with Dr. Jordan Peterson:
Bloomberg covered the story:
Damore also talked to Ben Shapiro:
But Damore’s first public interview was with Stefan Molyneux:
https://youtu.be/TN1vEfqHGro
Molyneux also talked about the affair, a little earlier:
https://youtu.be/gxIw9fyIK_c
And then there is Paul Joseph Watson and the art of the rant:
On this day in 1898, an Armistice ended the Spanish-American War, a war commemorated best by sociologist and economist William Graham Sumner in his classic essay “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.”