You make a revolution because you don’t have the institutions that support a democratic political life. You do it in order to get a democratic political life, but you don’t have the infrastructure in place to make that possible. So the question becomes how do you get from the desire to the reality of democratic political life? What Tocqueville loves about the United States is that they have this infrastructure already, because of the forms of local representative government that had already developed before they broke from Great Britain.
.. He basically says that countries develop a style of governing and that it’s extremely difficult to get away from that style of governing.
.. He wanted to argue that the problem with communism was that it was a false and contradictory ideology, and that you can’t change the world through ideology. You have to change the world through concrete political programmes.
.. It reveals that if you try to push for democracy without having an adequate institutional basis for it, you will end up with terror, violence, and the suppression of dissent. In short, you will end up with totalitarianism. So he’s taking the Tocqueville argument even further: Democracy can lead not just to despotism, but to totalitarianism.
.. One fact he mentions that surprised me, given the number of people he sent to their death, is that Robespierre started out as an opponent of capital punishment.
.. What the revolution showed is that it would, in future, be impossible to ignore the vast mass of the people. There will be many solutions to that problem. Some of those solutions won’t be so great. One could argue that fascism and communism are both different answers to, “What do you do about incorporating the mass of the people into the polity?” But representative forms of government will also be one very important example.
History of Guns in US Military
In the wars fought since World War II, the vast majority of men and women in uniform have not engaged in the intimate act of killing. Their work is much the same as their civilian counterparts’. It is the infantryman’s job to intentionally seek out and kill the enemy, at the risk of violent death. The Army and Marine Corps infantry, joined by a very small band of Special Operations forces, comprises roughly 100,000 soldiers, some 5 percent of uniformed Defense Department employees. During World War II, 70 percent of all soldiers killed at the hands of the enemy were infantry. In the wars since, that proportion has grown to about 80 percent. These are the (mostly) men whose survival depends on their rifles and ammunition.
.. He’s an experienced, long-service professional who deserves the same excellent firearm as the more “elite” Special Operations forces, who have the privilege of buying the best civilian gear off the shelf if they want to.
The Real Story of How America Became an Economic Superpower
Periodically, attempts have been made to rehabilitate the American leaders of the 1920s. The most recent version, James Grant’s The Forgotten Depression, 1921: The Crash That Cured Itself, was released just two days before The Deluge: Grant, an influential financial journalist and historian, holds views so old-fashioned that they have become almost retro-hip again. He believes in thrift, balanced budgets, and the gold standard; he abhors government debt and Keynesian economics. The Forgotten Depression is a polemic embedded within a narrative, an argument against the Obama stimulus joined to an account of the depression of 1920-21.
As Grant correctly observes, that depression was one of the sharpest and most painful in American history. Total industrial production may have dropped by 30 percent. Unemployment spiked at perhaps close to 12 percent (accurate joblessness statistics don’t exist for this period). Overall, prices plummeted at the steepest rate ever recorded—steeper than in 1929-33. Then, after 18 months of extremely hard times, the economy lurched into recovery. By 1923, the U.S. had returned to full employment.
.. Grant’s argument is not new. The libertarian economist Murray Rothbard argued a similar case in his 1963 book, America’s Great Depression. The Rothbardian story of the “good” depression of 1920 has resurfaced from time to time in the years since, most spectacularly when Fox News star Glenn Beckseized upon it as proof that the Obama stimulus was wrong and dangerous.
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Take the case of France, which suffered more in material terms than any World War I belligerent except Belgium. Northeastern France, the country’s most industrialized region in 1914, had been ravaged by war and German occupation. Millions of men in their prime were dead or crippled. On top of everything, the country was deeply in debt, owing billions to the United States and billions more to Britain. France had been a lender during the conflict too, but most of its credits had been extended to Russia, which repudiated all its foreign debts after the Revolution of 1917. The French solution was to exact reparations from Germany.
Take the case of France, which suffered more in material terms than any World War I belligerent except Belgium. Northeastern France, the country’s most industrialized region in 1914, had been ravaged by war and German occupation. Millions of men in their prime were dead or crippled. On top of everything, the country was deeply in debt, owing billions to the United States and billions more to Britain. France had been a lender during the conflict too, but most of its credits had been extended to Russia, which repudiated all its foreign debts after the Revolution of 1917. The French solution was to exact reparations from Germany.
Britain was willing to relax its demands on France. But it owed the United States even more than France did. Unless it collected from France—and from Italy and all the other smaller combatants as well—it could not hope to pay its American debts.
Americans, meanwhile, were preoccupied with the problem of German recovery. How could Germany achieve political stability if it had to pay so much to France and Belgium? The Americans pressed the French to relent when it came to Germany, but insisted that their own claims be paid in full by both France and Britain.
.. As the economy revived, workers scrambled for wage increases to offset the price inflation they’d experienced during the war. Monetary authorities, worried that inflation would revive and accelerate, made the fateful decision to slam the credit brakes, hard. Unlike the 1918 recession, that of 1920 was deliberately engineered. There was nothing invisible about it. Nor did the depression “cure itself.” U.S. officials cut interest rates and relaxed credit, and the economy predictably recovered—just as it did after the similarly inflation-crushing recessions of 1974-75 and 1981-82.
In 1913, a dollar bought a little less than one-twentieth of an ounce of gold; by 1922, it comfortably did so again.
James Grant hails this accomplishment. Adam Tooze forces us to reckon with its consequences for the rest of the planet.
.. America’s determination to restore a dollar “as good as gold” not only imposed terrible hardship on war-ravaged Europe, it also threatened to flood American markets with low-cost European imports. The flip side of the Lost Generation enjoying cheap European travel with their strong dollars was German steelmakers and shipyards underpricing their American competitors with weak marks.
.. The world owed the United States billions of dollars, but the world was going to have to find another way of earning that money than selling goods to the United States.
.. Between 1924 and 1930, world financial flows could be simplified into a daisy chain of debt. Germans borrowed from Americans, and used the proceeds to pay reparations to the Belgians and French. The French and Belgians, in turn, repaid war debts to the British and Americans. The British then used their French and Italian debt payments to repay the United States, who set the whole crazy contraption in motion again. Everybody could see the system was crazy. Only the United States could fix it. It never did.
.. He dreamed of conquering Poland, Ukraine, and Russia as a means of gaining the resources to match those of the United States. The vast landscape in between Berlin and Moscow would become Germany’s equivalent of the American west, filled with German homesteaders living comfortably on land and labor appropriated from conquered peoples—a nightmare parody of the American experience with which to challenge American power.
.. Hitler’s empire could not feed itself, so his invasion plan for the Soviet Union contemplated the death by starvation of 20 to 30 million Soviet urban dwellers after the invaders stole all foodstuffs for their own use.
How did Mark Zuckerberg train himself to be a programming prodigy?
Just because Mark started Facebook doesn’t mean he is a programming prodigy. Mark’s major was Pyschology so he wasn’t at Harvard as a CompSci prodigy. Back in 2004 building a CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) application in PHP/MySQL was fairly easy. I would bet if you had more insight into what people that seem to be amazing are really capable of, you would see that they are normal people with normal skills.
Facebook’s success (like many startups) is largely due to timing, solid product/market fit and a bit of luck. Those same rules apply to successful startups today, any of which could potentially be as big as Facebook. Where Mark made the right decision was surrounding himself with smart and talented people.