The More Things Change

As part of my plan to read all of the works on the Texas Unrequired Reading List, I finished Richard Hofstatler's The American Political Tradition--clearly a depressing book in that we never seem to learn from experience. Odd characters like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson both were confronted by large corporate powers and, while they had no interest in overturning capitalism, they did favor contolling these massive corporate entities, mostly through regulation. Hofstatler then turns to Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt--the former incapable of adjusting to the the economic catastrophe caused by unregulated business and making use of differing solutions to the problem of economic downturns, the latter becoming increasingly radical in his efforts to end the cycle of business collapses. Hofstatler suggests (in a book written in 1948) that we now understood the folly of unfettered capitalism, yet here we are, in 2010, right back to the ideologies of the 1920s--or worse, the 19th century. Another banking/financial sector catastrophe has occurred. We staved off, to some degree, an overwhelming economic catastrophe with government bailouts of predatory banks--and the idiot Republicans now oppose any meaningful effort at regulating the shadow banking world. And, naturally, there are any number of fools willing to vote for them. The Democrats can hardly pick up a finger to address financial regulation: apparently they are capable of passing only one major piece of legislation at a time. At least Franklin Roosevelt was willing to try virtually anything: unlike the contemporary timid and complacent party of the people.

I also read Martin Gardner's Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus and Lewis Thomas' Lives of the Cell, neither of which is so impressive (Gardner's book anthologizes his book reviews of work by scienific cranks and crackpots, Thomas's collection of short essays suggest that we're more like ants than we might imagine and that, yes, the Earth is a cell itself).