Thursday, March 27, 2008

Is John Galt already among us?

The credit crunch is getting so bad now, I can hardly look. So I thought I'd post a nice picture of a pussy cat to help us take our minds off things.

In the meantime, though it stands absolutely no chance of being enacted, there is a reasonably robust way out of this crisis, though it does entail the creation of a 100% reserve gold-backed currency. Like I said, no chance. But this life belt is out there if anybody wants it. Just ask nice Uncle George, one of the few men alive who ever had sufficient balls and brains to argue toe-to-toe with Uncle Murray. Which means that Uncle George is a Colossus and possibly the nearest thing we have to a living John Galt. If only the numskull powers-that-be had the wit to replace Bernanke or King with this man, then we would stand a fighting chance of getting out of this mess. Like I said, no chance. (At least for the moment.)

But at least Uncle George is still offering us his solutions. If things keep going the way that they are, then we may be forced sooner rather than later to take him up on them. John Galt may triumph, after all.

Bring it on.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

"one of the few men alive who ever had sufficient balls and brains to argue toe-to-toe with Uncle Murray"

That's interesting. Do you have any details of that? I always thought Reisman was regarded as somewhat of a heterodox in Austrian circles.

Jack Maturin said...

Reisman was always closer to the Randians than Rothbard, and when Rothbard drew himself away from Rand, Reisman remained behind. This led to a bitter conflict between the two men which took several decades to resolve. Check out Rothbard's biography, or "Memories of Mises, Rothbard, and Rand" on this page:

http://www.mises.org/media.aspx?action=showname&ID=143

And possibly before you listen to that, also the introductory and complementary piece by Lord Raico:

"The Mises Circle: Memoirs of Hayek in Chicago and Rothbard in New York"

Here:

http://www.mises.org/media.aspx?action=showname&ID=344

Even now Reisman isn't an "orthodox" Misesian, and is certainly no "Rothbardian". Speaking as a hard core Rothbardian/Hoppeian myself, I say "Good for Him!". At least he has the intellect and the argument to both understand the whole of Rothbardianism and then to posit alternative positions, often directly to the main man himself, when Rothbard was still with us! :-)

Whatever the case, he is certainly on the side of the angels. And if that's good enough for Lord Ralph Raico, then that's good enough for me.

Anonymous said...

Nice post!

And I think George Reisman is an archangel. ;-)