Dan Walker > Recent Status Updates

This book started alowly, but now I can barely put it down! Fascinating discussion about how Julian tried to institute government charity. The author argues it was because he saw that church bishops had become truly powerful - raising large sums for the poor with extensive client lists. Makes me think that is why the modern governments insist on running welfare today-to take power to itself and away from churches.

"Labor unrest contributed to the economy's sudden collapse in 1937." But then goes on to argue that the decision to balance the federal budget was the real cause of the "Roosevelt recession." But that makes no sense. If you're using borrowed money to pay people to do "make-work" jobs, the economy had never really recovered in the first place!

Roosevelt in 1936 - the populist! I mean, who cares about inflation and a balanced budget when there is an election to win, and you can skewer "the rich!" No wonder Democrats' hatred of Trump is so visceral. After all, they finally won the rich over to their party, and now Trump comes along and turns populism against them!

Guess who else hated the CCC? The UNIONS. Why on earth would "labor" oppose putting people to work??? Because pay of $1 per day would depress wages for union labor. Yet more evidence that the vast throngs of unemployed were deliberately kept there so that union labor could maintain its high wages and profit margins.

This seems like a very sane proposal: reduce federal pay 15%. After all, the cost of living had been reduced significantly since 1928. So my question is, "Why not extend this to the rest of the economy?" After all, reducing pay to the level that would allow businesses to make money would have eliminated unemployment in short order. If it was good for the federal government, why not for everyone else?

The build-up to actual shooting was a very dramatic time. There is a spy in the Amercan camp - one that was not exposed for a century! There are moves and counter moves. Our hero, Joseph Warren, works to lower the rhetoric because the British had to be seen as the initiators of hostilities, all while pushing the "country folk" to be ready for any attack by the British regulars. A very intense time!

"Hoover's doctrinaire attachment to the free market..." What??? This book isn't history; it's propaganda. They don't call it Hoover Dam because it was built by the free market!!!

I'm frustrated when writers downplay the amount of taxation the colonists were paying during the run-up to the Revolution. There were about 150 years of precedent on taxation. Plus, the colonists were REQUIRED to buy exclusively from Britain. Thus, it was not unreasonable for Britain to pay for the defense of the colonies. The mercantilist economic policy is only hinted at by this author. Frustrating.

The hard part about reading this book: words I recently heard keep echoing in my head: if the British had not decided to enter WWI, Woodrow Wilson would have lost the 2016 election, and no one would have ever heard of the assistant secretary of the Navy in his administration: FDR.

I am really enjoying this book. But I also disagree with it. Britian was economically prostrate after WWII. Mr. Ferguson's argument is that they should have just gone broke SOONER by abandoning appeasement and rearming as a deterrent to Hitler. How about fixing an economy with 14% unemployment instead? Growing the economy faster so that they could afford a military build-up???

"...the empire established by Lenin and his confederates was the first to be based on terror itself since the short-lived tyranny of the Jacobins in revolutionary France." I don't think anything more needs to be said about communism.

As a kid, I always wondered why "Lend/Lease" got so much attention when discussing WWII. It was held in awe, which didn't make much sense to me. Now I think I know why it is so well regarded: because unpaid WWI allied war debts were so politically unpopular in the US. Avoiding that raw nerve with the Lend/Lease program was a great political achievement for FDR.

Shares a couple of key points that the OTHER book in war debts chose to ignore: even with the debt that Britain owed the US, she was still a net CREDITOR. The book also points out that Britain insisted on payment terms that made the debts unmarketable to retail buyers. Britain wanted to deal with the US because she expected to be able to negotiate the terms down in the future. IMO she was negotiating in bad faith.

ANOTHER book on Britain's failure to pay its WWI debt to the US? Well, I find the debate very relevant. After all, what people really mean when they believe we should fight Russia in Ukraine is that the US taxpayer should pay for it. It was the same for WWI. When Europeans got mad at the US for expecting repayment, what they really meant was that the US taxpayer should pay for Europe's foolish decisions.

In socialism, everyone is equal. But some are always more equal than others.

Only now, the author directly states that the US taxpayer was told that the Allies' debts to the US were commercial loans and would be repaid But the Wilson admin must have known all along that they WEREN'T commercial loans: they weren't backed by any assets AND weren't spent on capital projects to generate income to repay the loans with interest. Churchill states the truth: the loans were literally shot away!

Awesome book, but there is a huge hole in the narrative. The book starts AFTER the war. After the US gov't had loaned money to the Allies. So the US looks like a meany. After all, why not forgive the broke Allies' debts? I suspect the reason is that the US public was repeatedly assured that the money would be repaid. Meanwhile, the Wilson administration signaled the Allies that they WOULDN'T have to repay it.

A stunning summary of the book of Job, which "provides no answer in the sense of an explanation or a justification of suffering and injustice. What it does offer is a stern warning to avoid the Scylla of blaspheming against the victims by assuming their wickedness and the Charybdis of blaspheming against Yahweh by assuming his (Greenberg, “Job,” 301)."

"This insistence that the faithful person’s relationship with Yahweh was not broken even in an idolatrous land, when added to Jeremiah’s hope for a newcovenant and future restoration, provided the exiles with the ideas that would transform the nation of Israel into the religion of Judaism."

On page 345, the author FINALLY states the obvious: Bo Jackson was a difficult man to like.

On page 180, Professor Hays shares how scholars of the last century or so have considered the purity laws (of the Torah) as "primitive and irrational taboos." It made me wonder what rituals we have today that future scholars will think of as irrational. What immediately jumped to mind was recycling, which serves no purpose except maybe to signal our devotion to the deity Mother Earth.

Reading about Hugh Culverhouse ticking off Bo Jackson in every way possible is making me think about Jerry Jones, who's now 3 for the last 3 training camps with a ticked off superstar who wants a new contract. I'm starting to think Jerry's too old for this business.

What I'm really hoping for is an explanation of WHY so many people want to immigrate to the US. I doubt I'll get that. Books that advertise themselves as being on Obama's reading list will most likely just whine about how terrible Americans are and how awful US immigration is.

The review of the Austro-Hungarian empire was fascinating. The fact that Woodrow Wilson was so focused on dismembering an empire that had stood for a millennium while leaving intact a Germany that had existed less 50 years strikes me as monumentally stupid. Possibly the stupidest act in world history.

I'm beginning to believe that the author deliberately made the book boring, so perhaps readers would miss the really important points that are made. OK, maybe that doesn't make much sense. But there is a lot of important history here that you'll miss if you're not alert.

Churchill and Orwell defended individual freedom, including the right to be persistently wrong? The right to criticize government leaders, especially when those leaders are completely convinced that they are right? What crazy ideas!

Most audiobooks, after a bit, you just want them to be done. Well, I'm 50% of the way into this one, and still utterly fascinated!

Of course, JP Morgan could straddle both worlds - the Old Guard elites and the new wealthy industrialists. But in business, he was "drawn to talent, energy, and competence, he had rejected partners whose qualifications were only dynastic." So Morgan was the TRUE traitor to his class.

Ah, we come to the real source of antipathy to the "robber barons" - the Knickerbockers and Brahmins - the Old Guard elite who could trace their social status back generations - who were replaced by the fabulously wealthy arrivistes. Men who made millions in railroads and finance in the last few decades of the 1800s.