Category: Today

On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech about an “adversary that poses a serious threat to the United States of America.” Describing it as “one of the last bastions of central planning, governs by dictating five year plans,” and that “with brutal consistency it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas.” 

The adversary? “The Pentagon bureaucracy — not the people, but the processes.” And he went on to state that the Pentagon could not account for more than $2.3 trillion.

The next day, September 11, “some people did something,” in the immortal words of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D‑Minn.),* and nearly everybody forgot about Rumsfeld’s alarm. The terrorist attacks on 9/​11, in New York and at the Pentagon itself, along with a citizen-​led resistance on United Flight 93, resulted in 2,977 fatalities, over 25,000 injuries, and substantial long-​term health consequences.

The unaccounted-​for spending and receipts of the Pentagon and the Department of Housing and Urban Development increased ten-​fold in the next 19 years. It appears to balloon like the federal debt. But we almost never talk about it.

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Rep. Omar said these words on March 23, 2019. They were not a hit.

On September 10, 1608, John Smith was elected council president of Jamestown, Virginia.

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On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech about an “adversary that poses a serious threat to the United States of America.” Describing it as “one of the last bastions of central planning, governs by dictating five year plans,” and that “with brutal consistency it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas.” 

The adversary? “The Pentagon bureaucracy — not the people, but the processes.” And he went on to state that the Pentagon could not account for more than $2.3 trillion.

On September 9, 1828, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born. Known most commonly in the English-​speaking world as Leo Tolstoy, he became the celebrated author of the novels Anna Karenina and War and Peace, as well as the novellas and short stories such as “Family Happiness,” “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” and “The Kreutzer Sonata.”

His political and religious ideas heavily influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tolstoy died in 1910.

On September 8, 1264, Boleslaus the Pious, Duke of Greater Poland, promulgated the Statute of Kalisz, guaranteeing Jews safety and personal liberties and giving battei din jurisdiction over Jewish matters.

On the same date in 1883, former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant drove in the final “golden spike” completing the Northern Pacific Railway in a ceremony at Gold Creek, Montana.

On September 7, 2008, the U.S. Government “took control” of the two largest mortgage financing companies in the United States, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. 

Both of these had been created, decades before, by Congress as part of a concerted plan to make home ownership easier, and both had gotten completely out of hand during the many years of their existence, especially under new rules established by politicians in the 1990s. The after-​market that they helped create — the packaged mortgage market — was what imploded in 2007 – 2008, leading to the economic slump that Nicholas Nassim Taleb referred to as setting the U.S. government on President Obama’s economic policy course of “eight years of Novocain.”

On September 6, 1843, Yves Guyot was born. 

A journalist, economist, and political activist, he once endured a six-​month prison term for his campaign against the prefecture of police. He served as minister of public works under the premiership of P.E. Tirard in 1889, retaining his portfolio in the cabinet of Charles de Freycinet until 1892. A free-​trade liberal, he lost his seat in the election of 1893 owing to his militant attitude against socialism. His many books included The Principles of Social Economy (1892), The Tyranny of Socialism (1894), The Comedy of Protection (1906), Socialistic Fallacies (1910), and Where and Why Public Ownership Has Failed (1914). He served as editor of Journal des Économistes, following the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari.

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Illustration is a detail from a caricature by artist André Gill (1840 – 1885).