Remarkable new evidence of Nixon's treason

[hippifried]

1965: "We are all Keynesians now."; Milton Friedman, Keynes' arch nemesis, & founder of the other economic theory, anti-Keynesianism. This phrase might even predate '65, but I'm not a researcher & don't really care. The phrase seems to pop up whenever anti-Keynesians cause another economic crisis that has to be fixed through government intervention. That happens every time anti-Keynesians gain enough power to have any say-so whatsoever over economic policy.

Keynes was a gold bug (or at least he was too easily persuaded to seem that way). As far as I'm concerned, the flaw in his approach was insistence on a tangible reserve. It was Friedman who basically convinced Nixon to shock. Supply side interventionism can't work if there's a way to control currency valuation by central banks, other than plain addition.

[fivekatz]

We seem to be talking in circles here. What Nixon did and you call shock was considered very liberal policy at all the time. It was an example of his willingness IMO of moving away from the conservative dogma of his era to do what he believed was in the best interest of the US.

There are those that believe that this move was a terrible on, though as you point out it was quite inevitable as their wasn't enough gold in the earth to back all the currency on the planet.

Economically Nixon was caught in the beginning of the decline of US super dominance, the country no longer was an independent nation in terms of natural resources and the rise in the price of oil by itself was quite inflationary.

I'd be curious what your thoughts are about the Volker impact on the overall performance of the US economy in the 80's and what you believe the legacy of Greenspan is?

[hippifried]

Nothing circular on this end. I'm not confused at all. The Nixon Shock (Not me. That's the historical term for what happened on 08/15/1971.) was a reactionary policy move. Irrespective of the rhetorical nonsense, told then & now, the shock was never an attempt at benevolence. I watched it all unfold in real time. Labor was the bogey man. Wages were blamed for inflation. Manufacturing & resellers were handed an inflated price target, while wages were frozen or cut by executive decree. That's not "liberal policy" then, now, or ever, & no attempt to rewrite the dictionary can change that. You're working off a false premise.

The bad move wasn't ending the gold peg. It was crashing the world's monetary system to do it & handing the power to valuate currencies over to anonymous money changers around the world. There was no reason to scrap a stable system just to get gold out of a position it shouldn't have been in. Gold isn't money, & money isn't a commodity. There's no reason currencies can't be pegged.

I don't for one instant buy the idea that the US was in decline pre shock. We had plenty of resources, & the price of oil didn't really spike until the Arab embargo 2 years later. That could create a whole new topic easily.

I'm not a big Paul Volker fan. He over promised what could be delivered under Humphrey-Hawkins. Because money isn't a commodity, the radical supply side intervention of the Federal Reserve just made things worse in the long run, even though it put brakes on the hyperinflation that had gripped the country since the shock. But then again, that's really the only tool the central bank has. Using the Fed as an economic cure-all is dangerous at best. Alan Greenspan's legacy is one of errors, by his own admission. He was principle author of the wage interventions in '72, & despite all his mea culpas, I find myself hard pressed to forgive.

[Cuchulain]

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson on the death of Richard Nixon:

Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."...

'
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern -- but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.
Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him -- except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.'
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...-crook/308699/


Goddamn I miss HST.

[Cuchulain]

More from HST on Nixon:

'At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps 50 feet down to the lawn … pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness…toward the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying desperately to remember which one of those 400 iron balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell's apartment.

Ah…nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season.'
http://raincoaster.com/2006/05/01/hu...-ever-written/