J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 227

Josh Barro: Modern Monetary Theory Doesn���t Make Single-...

Josh Barro: Modern Monetary Theory Doesn���t Make Single-payer Any Easier: "The government is not constrained by its ability to obtain dollars, but the economy is constrained by real limits on productive capacity. If the government prints and spends money when the economy is at or near full employment, MMT counsels (correctly) that this will lead to inflation, and prescribes deficit-reducing tax increases to reduce aggregate demand and thereby control inflation...

....See how we have ended up back where we started? Whether you take a Keynesian view or an MMT view, if the government spends more, it���s likely going to need to tax more, sooner or later.... I believe Kelton is correct that both economists and economic policymakers have been too focused on the risks of high deficits relative to low ones, and too focused on the risk of inflation versus the risk of unemployment. That is, while policymakers know we should run deficits in recessions, when the recession is really big they don���t run them large enough for long enough....

���I have a certain sympathy for MMT; I think they are more correct than the people who are trying to revive Bowles-Simpson,��� says Furman, referring to a proposal from early this decade to sharply reduce federal budget deficits. ���Those people may have the right model and the wrong parameters. MMT may have the wrong model, but it may get you the same thing as the right model if you have the right parameters���...

#noted

Matt Bruenig: What���s the Point of Modern Monetary Theor...

Matt Bruenig: What���s the Point of Modern Monetary Theory?: "I have only ever written about MMT one time way back in 2013... pondering whether MMT is really just a very roundabout way of arguing that we should manage the price level through the fiscal authority and the debt level through the monetary authority rather than the other way around.... In the six years after my 2013 post, it has become clear to me that the bulk of MMT discourse is not really about what the best policy instruments are for maintaining price stability and debt stability, but rather about using word games to make people believe that the US can have Northern European levels of government spending without Northern European levels of taxation...

...If you understand the MMT private language or have a couple of hours available to talk to an MMT advocate and slowly peel back the layers of obfuscation they like to use, you realize that ���taxes don���t fund spending��� is not saying we don���t need to raise taxes to expand the welfare state. Rather, it is saying that, in their idiosyncratic way of categorizing things, the necessary taxes do not ���fund the welfare state,��� but merely ���offset the inflation caused by the money creation that funds the welfare state.��� This is a good way to jam up the discourse and confuse people, which can arguably be useful politically, but as a policy matter, it does not add any new insight....

If the point of MMT is really about how it would be better to have the fiscal authority manage the price level and the monetary authority manage the debt level... you would expect to see a lot more discussion about the competencies and flexibilities of each authority at those tasks. But there is surprisingly little written about such things in these circles. The real point of MMT seems to be to deploy misleading rhetoric with the goal of deceiving people about the necessity of taxes in a social democratic system...

#noted

Larry Kudlow (April 7, 2008): The Therapeutic Power of Re...

Larry Kudlow (April 7, 2008): The Therapeutic Power of Recessions: "Let���s also remember that recessions are therapeutic. They���re even necessary to create the foundations for the next recovery. Economic excesses always occur in free-market capitalist economies, and from time to time they must be cleansed. Just think about the excessive risk-speculation, leverage, and housing prices of the current episode. If anything, recessions make for clean starts...

#noted

An excellent catch from Equitable Growth's Michael Kades ...

An excellent catch from Equitable Growth's Michael Kades here. The debate over hospital mergers was mostly about whether scale-driven improvements in quality and reductions in cost would or would not be outweighed by the harm done by greater monopoly-power margins in charges to insurance companies and to patients. But it is looking increasingly likely that there are no scale driven improvements in quality or reductions in costs. He sends us to the extremely sharp Austin Frakt: Michael Kades: "The hospital industry, perhaps more than any other, had argued that consolidation will improve quality. Data increasingly says no: Austin Frakt: Hospital Mergers Improve Health? Evidence Shows the Opposite: "The claim was that larger organizations would be able to harness economies of scale and offer better care...

#noted

Note to Self: I am voting for Spider-Man: Into the Spider...

Note to Self: I am voting for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse #spiderverse

Wikipedia: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

#notetoself #movies

Debt-Derangement Syndrome: No Longer Fresh at Project Syndicate���Long Version

Debt-Derangement Syndrome: Standard policy economics dictates that the public sector needs to fill the gap in aggregate demand when the private sector is not spending enough. After a decade of denial, the Global North may finally be returning to economic basics.

For the past decade the public sphere of the Global North has been in a fit of high madness with respect to its excessive fear of government debts and deficits. But this affliction may be breaking. In the past two weeks I have noted two straws in the wind.

Earlier this month I read in the London Times a Brexit-related column from the eminent and highly knowledgeable Ken Rogoff���perhaps best known to many for his declarations early in this decade that governments simply should not let their debt-to-annual-GDP ratios rise above 90%���musing that it had "never been remotely obvious to [him] why the UK should be worrying about reducing its debt���GDP burden, given modest growth, high inequality and the... decline in... interest rates..."

Late last month Brandon Greeley of the Financial Times wrote about what he called a "panicked email" he had received from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget���perhaps best known to many for giving a fiscal responsibility award to now-ex House Speaker Paul Ryan, the then-chair of the US House of Representatives Budget Committee. In its email, the CRFB warned against���warning against ���mischaracterizations��� of my old teacher Olivier Blanchard's American Economic Association Presidential Address on debts and deficits, in which Blanchard argued that public debt is not an ever-present menace but rather a tool governments should use when it makes sense for them to do so, and that the interest rate at which the government can borrow is the sensible yardstick to use to assess the costs of using that tool.

What Rogoff and Blanchard are saying���and what the CRFB is asking people to close their ears against���today is standard policy economics. In fact, I always found and still find it hard to believe anybody can take exception to it. Whenever the private sector sits down���stops spending enough to keep unemployment low and jobs easy to find���then it is time for the public sector to stand up and fill in the gap in aggregate demand.

The standard way of doing this is to have the central bank buy bonds for cash, inducing those who would then have extra cash to boost their spending. But when and if interest rates would approach rock bottom, the private sector���s desire to spend rather than hold extra cash would ebb. Then it would be appropriate for monetary stimulus to be aided by fiscal stimulus: the government directly buying stuff.

What about fears that the debt would rise "too high" and make issuing more government debt to finance more government purchases a bad deal, even with its employment-boosting effects? The deal would be bad only were the interest rate at which the government would have to borrow was high���as it had been at the start of the 1990s���and the deal would be risky only to the extent that the interest rate at which the government would have to roll over its debt might become high. Thus the bond market would signal when the deficit needed to be cut and the debt-to-GDP ratio placed on a downward trajectory.

The principle that the cost of debt is measured by the interest rate charged would seem simple. It would seem obvious. And yet for the past decade���until now���it has been a fringe belief in the public sphere of the Global North: called "ulta-Keynesian" by the polite among the great and good of the public sphere.

I date the full flowering of this affliction to January 27, 2010. That evening, in his State of the Union Address, then-American President Barack Obama claimed that it was time for the government to tighten its belt, that he was going to freeze government spending, and that he was going veto bills passed by the then majority-Democratic Congress that overstepped his red line. He did this in his State of the Union message. At the time, my first reaction was that issuing a veto threat against his two chief lieutenants Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid was a unique way of building intra-party comity, and not a way I had heard of before of maintaining a functioning governing coalition.

Obama economic policy staffers say, rightly, that Obama was the most-rational and best-behaved of the ruling politicians of the Global North in the early half of this decade. They are correct. But it is a powerful marker of the times that Obama's communications and political staff���and Obama���thought the principle that, as John Maynard Keynes put it in 1937, "the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury" should be rhetorically denied when the unemployment rate was still 9.7%.

Now Barack Obama and his political staff had been briefed by some of the finest policy economists in the world. They had been told over and over again that ""the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury". None of the Obama economic policy staffers I talked to in the ensuing week, or since, have ever admitted endorsing this line in the 2010 State of the Union. Some say they opposed it. Some say they let it pass because they needed to keep their powder dry But no one thought its inclusion worth threatening to resign over���they either thought it was not a big deal, or that their resignation would be viewed not as a loss but as a benefit by the collective mind of the White House and so greeted with a sigh of relief, and reality-based policymaking would move out of the administration's gasp.

Blame for this line was typically placed on the administration���s Cossacks: ���that was f���������ing Rahm [Emmanuel]...��� But always remember: the Cossacks work for the Czar, for if the Czar did not approve of what his Cossacks were doing he would find new ones. And these briefings by some of the best policy economists in the world had remarkably little influence on the thinking of the non-economists in the Obama administration and no discernible influence on the thinking of the Obama White House political and communication staff.

It is still not clear to me why the Global North public sphere fell into this fit of denial of the basic economic principles that the interest rate is a yardstick to the cost of debt and deficits and that austerity is inappropriate when unemployment is high. But I hvae hopes that economists in the future will remember this sorry history of the past decade, and so keep the future from being doomed to repeat it.

#publicfinance #politics #macro #highlighted #fiscalpolicy #finance #economicsgonewrong #politicaleconomy


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Department of "Huh!?!?" This has always struck me as so w...

Department of "Huh!?!?" This has always struck me as so wrong on so many levels.

Ever since the first politician promulgated the first regulations about product quality and measure, politicians have been legislating market outcomes as they structure markets. What could make a person write such a thing as this?:

Kevin Murphy (2014): How Gary Becker Saw the Scourge of Discrimination: "The rise of the civil-rights movement helped Becker���s work to win wider acclaim in the 1960s.... Legal remedies sought by the campaigners played no significant role in his analysis.... Legal remedies have corrected some problems but exacerbated others.... Firms intent on discriminating in their hiring practices can move to locations without significant minority populations. More fundamentally, if people have a tendency to discriminate on the basis of race, legislation cannot eliminate that tendency. Politicians cannot merely legislate a new outcome, or legislate preferences away. They can only change the way discrimination manifests itself.... One obvious question begged by Becker���s work was, who benefits from discrimination? While he did not directly address this, he did suggest that one beneficiary might be labor unions...

...Unions historically supported many aspects of discrimination since their members competed for jobs with black workers. The Economics of Discrimination remains relevant, first, as an inspiration for academic research. A recent example is work by Kerwin Kofi Charles of the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and Jonathan Guryan of Northwestern University, who use Becker���s approach in an effort to understand how theoretical arguments about wage differentials between black and white workers fit with empirical data. Secondly, Becker���s use of the equilibrium concept, applied to discrimination, remains critical in gauging the impact of antidiscrimination legislation���economists continue to use it to measure how it has affected pay and education, and where employers locate. Third, the attention Becker drew to premarket factors as a key area of discrimination continues to shape public-policy debates. Seeing an opportunity to tackle the problem, Becker thought market forces���in education, through charter schools and vouchers���could help minorities advance economically...

#noted #highlighted

Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (February 23, 2019)

Weekend Reading: Why Is William L. Shirer's (1960) "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" Still the Best Book to Read About Nazi Germany?

For the Weekend: Melissa Etheridge and Serena Ryder: The Sing-off!

Comment of the Day: Kansas Jack: The Jesus Landing Pad: "It's more than foreign policy. Because the 2nd coming is imminent, Global Warming is not a threat either. And that is a lot of people in this country who believe Revelation has shown how the Earth ends and cite Genesis that God has promised never to again flood the world...

Weekend Reading: The Federal Reserve in 2011 Debates Christina Romer's Ideas About the Need for "Regime Change"

Weekend Watching: A Night at the Garden

Against Alasdair Macintyre's "After Virtue"...: Alasdair Macintyre, at least in his _After Virtue _mode, believes that good civilizations are ones with moral consensus led by prophets, rather than ones with moral confusion managed by managers... Trotskys (less preferred) or St. Benedicts (more preferred), but... [not] managerial Keyneses.... Trotsky says that History speaking through Marx and him knows how to build a Communist utopia. What is a Communist utopia? It is a society... well-fed, well-clothed, well-housed, and well-entertained.... We can see that Keynes was totally correct in wanting to reduce the influence of a Trotsky in the public square, because a Trotsky���s ideas about good organization of the economy were seen immediately by Keynes as, and turned out to be a horrible disaster, even from the perspective of Trotsky���s values���especially from the perspective of Trotsky���s values...

��scar Jord��, Chitra Marti, Fernanda Nechio, and Eric Tallman: Inflation: Stress-Testing the Phillips Curve: "The increased importance of inflation expectations exposes new risks to standard monetary policy practice. In particular, it suggests that conducting policy consistently to keep expectations well-anchored to the target is key to avoiding large swings in inflation. When policy is set consistently, the public discounts deviations of the unemployment rate from its natural rate and of inflation from its target as transitory...

David Leonhardt: New York Did Us All a Favor by Standing Up to Amazon - The New York Times: "Yes, Amazon���s departure will modestly hurt the city���s economy. But it���s also a victory against bad economic policy...

Joe Heim: Acts of Extreme Vandalism by Students Stun Gonzaga College High School

Meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee on November 1���2, 2011

TBPInvictus (2012): Open Mouth, Insert Foot: Going Viral?: "I had barely finished reading Niall Ferguson���s takedown of President Obama when a flood of takedowns of Mr. Ferguson started hitting the web. This post, then, will not be about his Newsweek piece, but instead about his recent Bloomberg TV interview with Erik Schatzker and Sara Eisen. And, in particular, one very specific part of that interview where Ferguson makes what is well beyond what I could even charitably refer to as a rookie mistake...

Izabella Kaminska: Stuff Elon Says: "Elon Musk is often dubbed a genius. And yet... if the following statement Musk made during the Tesla Q4 earnings call is anything to go by, he has a habit of stating the obvious and thinking it sounds deeply profound and insightful: 'The demand for-the demand for Model 3 is insanely high. The inhibitor is affordability. It's just like people literally don't have the money to buy the car. It's got nothing to do with desire. They just don't have enough money in their bank account. If the car can be made more affordable, the demand is extraordinary...' So, to help introduce Elon to the concept of how demand and supply interacts with price we thought we'd take the above quote and adapt it according to various economic scenarios in classic econ text book style...

Cheddar: How Focus Music Hacks Your Brain

Greg Farrell: Paul Manafort Could Face New York Charges If Trump Pardons Him: "Cy Vance has been investigating ex-Trump aide since 2017. District Attorney sees way to avoid double jeopardy protection...

Maya Gurantz: Kompromat: Or, Revelations from the Unpublished Portions of Andrea Manafort���s Hacked Texts - Los Angeles Review of Books

Pyeong Chang Tofu House: Menus

Now compiling and sending out fewer links than in the past, but still by far the best sorter and selector of what is interesting in economics: Mark Thoma: Economist's View: Links (2/19/19)

Will McGrew sends us to new EPI employee and friend of Equitable Growth Pedro Nicolaci da Costa: The U.S. Job Market Doesn���t Feel so Hot Despite the Low Unemployment Rate: "Workers need the economy to stay hot so they can begin to see the dividends of high growth.... There are several reasons a purportedly booming U.S. economy doesn���t feel like much of a boon to millions of American workers, chief among them the startling lack of wage growth many have experienced over the past four decades.... A business- and bank-friendly mindset at the Federal Reserve, whose top officials spend a lot more time with their high-flying Wall Street and industry contacts than with workers and community leaders, deepens this imbalance.... Because of the Fed���s proximity to its business contacts, it tends to think of workers as labor costs (not investments in human capital) and wages as inflation (not improvements in standards of living). This colors the Fed���s definition of 'full employment', making policy makers easily swayed by dubious claims from business executives about chronic labor shortages���made without any contention about why wages are not rising on a sustained basis...

I would not have called MMT "nonsense economics". Thus I think Jonathan Portes needs to put a choke collar on Prospect's headline writers. It is very much the case that MMT done right focuses attention on the inflation constraint rather than the financiers-are-scared-the-debt-is-too-high constraint, and that would seem to me to be a healthy thing. However, I do worry about multiple equilibria���and jumps between equilibria: Jonathan Portes: Nonsense Economics: The Rise of Modern Monetary Theory: "Under MMT, fiscal policy is the main tool. This may well make sense when interest rates are at or close to zero.��But that... was explicitly recognised by��government policy during and immediately after the 2008 financial��crisis.... It���s an integral part of Labour���s fiscal rule.... It��also means that MMT���at least the credible version���does not mean there��is no limit to deficits, just a different one, dictated by the��potential impact on inflation.... So in the end I... find... MMT... frustrating... [as] a mixture of the tautological, the��obvious and the tendentious.... The claim that that MMT means��that a future government can dodge hard choices about how to pay for��decent public services is just plain nonsense...

The very sharp Gavyn Davies summarizes four views of the macro outlook: Powell/Bernanke/Summers/DeLong. Not sure I belong in this company... As he sees it, the Fed is now confident that there will neither be inflation which will require it to raise interest rates and trigger a recession nor private-sector weakness which ought to have led the Fed to have already returned the Federal Funds rate to zero. The first seems correct. But I am not sure why the Fed believes in tiger second���and I have no idea what the Fed thinks it can do if the second comes to pass: Gavyn Davies: Recessions and Bear Markets���The Terrible Twins: "Many global markets... are now pricing a probability of recession of at least 50 per cent within 12 months.��This recession risk seems far too high.... Inter-relationships between recessions and bear markets are complex and not very well understood. It is clear that they tend broadly to coincide in their timing.... Economists often assume that recessions are basically caused by economic fundamentals, with the financial markets reacting when these fundamentals deteriorate. Sometimes investors may be able to discern rising recession risks before they actually appear in hard economic data...

Jemima Kelly: Stuff Elon Says, (Inevitable) Bitcoin Edition: "Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared on ARK Invest���s ���For Your Innovation��� podcast on Tuesday, to be fawned over interviewed by Ark CEO Cathie Wood and analyst Tasha Keeney.... A strange choice of podcast for him to appear on given that nobody has heard of it, perhaps? Not really. ARK Invest... is very bullish on Tesla.... Wood has said at various times that Tesla is the next Amazon, the next Apple, and that Musk is 'a one in a billion type of person'. (Implying six other Elons might be on the loose around the planet?)... Wood is also very bullish on blockchain and crypto. Very bullish.... Musk, in response to Wood, said (emphasis ours): 'Yeah. It bypasses currency controls. Yeah. **Paper money is going away, and crypto is a far better way to transfer value than pieces of paper, that���s for sure.' It was already a close correlation, but the Tesla-bro-to-crypto-bro Venn diagram is officially a perfect circle...

How could we tell if someone is interested in maintaining their own place at the top of a pyramid of status, authority, and wealth or in aiding the growth of knowledge?: Stuart Ritchie: @StuartJRitchie: "He���s quietly deleted it now, but here���s the attitude of a senior scholar to people trying to improve the quality of scientific research: Cass Sunstein: 'It is right and important to ask whether social science findings can be replicated���but in another life, the replication police would be Stasi'...

Yannay Spitzer: UC Berkeley Event: Pale in Comparison: The Economic Ecology of the Jews as a Rural Service Minority: "Econ 211, Economic History | February��25 | 2-3:30 p.m. | 639��Evans Hall... https://yannayspitzer.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/spitzer-pale-in-comparison-150426.pdf

Margaret Talbot: Revisiting the American Nazi Supporters of ���A Night at the Garden���: "Even more unnerving than the strangeness of the spectacle is the creeping sense of familiarity it evokes. Kuhn���s snarky excoriation of the 'Jewish-controlled' press, his demand 'that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it', and even the idolatry of the Founding Fathers all have their echoes in far-right politics today. No moment in the film seems more redolent of our current demagogue���s maga rallies than the one in which a protester scrambles onto the stage���he was Isadore Greenbaum, a twenty-six-year-old plumber���s helper from Brooklyn���and is promptly tackled and pummelled by Kuhn supporters, amid appreciative laughter and hooting from the crowd. One advantage to living through Trumpism is that it has compelled a reckoning with aspects of our country���s past that, for a long time, many Americans preferred not to acknowledge...

Marcy Wheeler: How Amy Berman Jackson Got Roger Stone to Step in It and Then Step in It Again: "Here���s what she did.... Impose a gag that a Twitter account bearing Stone���s name may have violated within an hour. Get Rogow and Stone on the record explaining why the terms of her gag won���t impact Stone���s ability to make a living, undercutting a significant part of the First Amendment claim they���ve been making. Provide a basis for the gag that Rogow did not anticipate, which may be far harder���and politically more difficult���to challenge. Provide an opportunity for both the prosecution and herself to catch Stone in multiple sworn lies (which, again, I���m sure the FBI is busy at work proving now), which if charged as perjury would lead to Stone���s immediate jailing...

I am told that somewhere on the internet there was once an exchange where Scott Winship told Matthew Yglesias that Winship's strategy was to become famous and influential by concern-trolling progressive researchers and analysts. Anybody know where it is? Don't give him oxygen. And no, I have never here anybody ever say "Scott Winship values integrity above nearly all else": Scott Winship: "I recently accused researchers at the Center for American Progress of an 'amateur-hour' mistake.... I had been accused of double-counting in the debate that drove me off Twitter.... I never suggested the CAP researchers were trying to mislead anyone. People��who know me���even those who regularly disagree with me and who don't like me, I think���know that I value integrity above nearly all else.... For reasons that end up being technical... I was wrong in my specific charge of double-counting against the CAP researchers.... I do believe that other statements in the report I criticized and a comment by CAP president Neera Tanden in the Vox.com piece that highlighted the report do in fact double-count in the way I (incorrectly) said that a specific chart did. And I have other criticisms...

Jerry Wang: Decrypting Crypto: The Evolutionary Biology Behind Blockchain-Backed Currencies

There has never been such a clown show. Lighthizer, desperate, tries to lecture his boss, and then renames his "Memorandum of Understanding" a "Trade Agreement". Why? Because Trump thinks the agreement is binding if it is called "Trade Agreement" and not binding if it is called "Memorandum of Understanding": Jennifer Jacobs and Justin Sink: Trump's Trade Chief Lectures His Boss and Gets Earful in Return: "Negotiators have been drafting MOUs.... Trump told gathered reporters that the memorandums would 'be very short term. I don���t like MOUs because they don���t mean anything. To me, they don���t mean anything'.... Lighthizer then jumped in to defend the strategy, with Trump looking on. 'An MOU is a binding agreement... detailed.... It���s a legal term. It���s a contract'.... But the president, unswayed, fired back at Lighthizer. 'By the way I disagree', Trump said. The top Chinese negotiator, Vice Premier Liu He, laughed out loud...

Perhaps the strangest thing seen in the clash between Ilhan Omar and Elliot Abrams on whether he has any business working representing the U.S. abroad (he does not have any such business) was the reaction of CAP Foreign-Policy Vice President Kelly Magsamen: "Elliott Abrams... is a fierce advocate for human rights and democracy. Yes, he made serious professional mistakes and was held accountable.... we share goals..." I am flummoxed and flabbergasted: Charles R. Pierce: Ilhan Omar Questions Elliot Abrams Over El Mozote Massacre, Activities in El Salvador, Guatemala, Central America: "Ilhan Omar's Cross-Examination of Elliot Abrams Honored Thousands of Central American Dead: Someone in Congress finally asked a world-historical ghoul to answer for what he did...

John Holbo: @jholbo1: "Write an article entitled "Gaslighting Political Liberalism". I thought of this reading Zizek ages ago but today I read Vermeule. The argument alleges a paradoxical, debilitating blindspot. Political liberalism is supposed to be broadminded, self-critical and yet-and yet!-it cannot see this hole at the heart of ... (bum-bum-BUM!) ITSELF! But the existence of the hole is un-demonstrated, merely asserted (this is the gaslight part of the production)...

The very smart Simon Johnson believes that something like codetermination is essential if modern capitalism is going to work: Simon Johnson: Saving Capitalism from Economics 101: "Warren is proposing a much broader rethink. Large corporations can still do well, but they need to be held accountable in a much more transparent way. Incentives for executives would be adjusted, and running these companies would no longer be so much about lining their own pockets.... The legitimacy of capitalism���private ownership and reliance on market mechanisms���would be greatly strengthened under the Accountable Capitalism Act. So, yes, like it or not, this will be on the final exam...

#noted #webogs

Weekend Reading: Why Is William L. Shirer's (1960) "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" Still the Best Book to Read About Nazi Germany?

Why is this still the best book to read about Nazi Germany?: William L. Shirer (1960): The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0671728687: "A few moments later they witnessed the miracle. The man with the Charlie Chaplin mustache, who had been a down-and-out tramp in Vienna in his youth, an unknown soldier of World War I, a derelict in Munich in the first grim postwar days, the somewhat comical leader of the Beer Hall Putsch, this spellbinder who was not even German but Austrian, and who was only forty-three years old, had just been administered the oath as Chancellor of the German Reich...

...He drove the hundred yards to the Kaiserhof and was soon with his old cronies, Goebbels, Goering, Roehm and the other Brownshirts who had helped him along the rocky, brawling path to power. ���He says nothing, and all of us say nothing,��� Goebbels recorded, ���but his eyes are full of tears.��� That evening from dusk until far past midnight the delirious Nazi storm troopers marched in a massive torchlight parade to celebrate the victory. By the tens of thousands, they emerged in disciplined columns from the depths of the Tiergarten, passed under the triumphal arch of the Brandenburg Gate and down the Wilhelmstrasse, their bands blaring the old martial airs to the thunderous beating of the drums, their voices bawling the new Horst Wessel song and other tunes that were as old as Germany, their jack boots beating a mighty rhythm on the pavement, their torches held high and forming a ribbon of flame that illuminated the night and kindled the hurrahs of the onlookers massed on the sidewalks.

From a window in the palace Hindenburg looked down upon the marching throng, beating time to the military marches with his cane, apparently pleased that at last he had picked a Chancellor who could arouse the people in a traditionally German way. Whether the old man, in his dotage, had any inkling of what he had unleashed that day is doubtful. A story, probably apocryphal, soon spread over Berlin that in the midst of the parade he had turned to an old general and said, ���I didn���t know we had taken so many Russian prisoners.���

A stone���s throw down the Wilhelmstrasse Adolf Hitler stood at an open window of the Chancellery, beside himself with excitement and joy, dancing up and down, jerking his arm up continually in the Nazi salute, smiling and laughing until his eyes were again full of tears. One foreign observer watched the proceedings that evening with different feelings. ���The river of fire flowed past the French Embassy,��� Andr�� Fran��ois-Poncet, the ambassador, wrote, ���whence, with heavy heart and filled with foreboding, I watched its luminous wake.���7 Tired but happy, Goebbels arrived home that night at 3 A.M. Scribbling in his diary before retiring, he wrote: ���It is almost like a dream��� a fairy tale��� The new Reich has been born. Fourteen years of work have been crowned with victory. The German revolution has begun!

The Third Reich which was born on January 30, 1933, Hitler boasted, would endure for a thousand years,9 and in Nazi parlance it was often referred to as the ���Thousand-Year Reich.��� It lasted twelve years and four months, but in that flicker of time, as history goes, it caused an eruption on this earth more violent and shattering than any previously experienced, raising the German people to heights of power they had not known in more than a millennium, making them at one time the masters of Europe from the Atlantic to the Volga, from the North Cape to the Mediterranean, and then plunging them to the depths of destruction and desolation at the end of a world war which their nation had cold-bloodedly provoked and during which it instituted a reign of terror over the conquered peoples which, in its calculated butchery of human life and the human spirit, outdid all the savage oppressions of the previous ages.

The man who founded the Third Reich, who ruled it ruthlessly and often with uncommon shrewdness, who led it to such dizzy heights and to such a sorry end, was a person of undoubted, if evil, genius. It is true that he found in the German people, as a mysterious Providence and centuries of experience had molded them up to that time, a natural instrument which he was able to shape to his own sinister ends. But without Adolf Hitler, who was possessed of a demonic personality, a granite will, uncanny instincts, a cold ruthlessness, a remarkable intellect, a soaring imagination and���until toward the end, when, drunk with power and success, he overreached himself���an amazing capacity to size up people and situations, there almost certainly would never have been a Third Reich...

#history #books #fascism #weekendreading

For the Weekend: Melissa Etheridge and Serena Ryder: The Sing-off!

Melissa Etheridge and Serena Ryder: The Sing-off!:

* #fortheweekend #music