David Boaz

At Politico Jeff Greenfield writes about “The Hollywood Hit Movie That Urged FDR to Become a Fascist.” The movie was “Gabriel Over the White House” in 1933 and, Greenfield writes, “it was designed as a clear message to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that he might need to embrace dictatorial powers to solve the crisis of the Great Depression.” Greenfield assures us that FDR did not become a dictator, but he notes that “the impulse toward strongman rule” often stems from a sense of populist grievance, along with the scapegoating of “subversive enemies undermining the nation.” Depending on the time and the strongman, those subversive enemies can be Jews, capitalists, Wall Street, the 1 percent, the homosexuals, or in some countries the Americans.

Gene Healy wrote about “Gabriel” 10 years ago in The Cult of the Presidency and in this column in 2012:

…many of us still believe in authoritarian powers for the president.

In a November 2011 column, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank offered “A Machiavellian model for Obama” in Jack Kennedy’s “kneecapping” and “mob-style threats” against steel-company executives who’d dared to raise prices.

Despite the obligatory caveat: “President Obama doesn’t need to sic the FBI on his opponents,” Milbank observed that “the price increase was rolled back” only after “subpoenas flew [and] FBI agents marched into steel executives’ offices”: “Sometimes, that’s how it must be. Can Obama understand that?”

Greenfield says “Gabriel” was both a commercial and critical hit, but “faded into obscurity, in large measure because the idea of a “benevolent dictatorship” seemed a lot less attractive after the degradation of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.”

But that wasn’t so obvious in 1933. As I wrote in a review of Three New Deals by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, there was a lot of enthusiasm in the United States for central planning and “Fascist means to gain liberal ends.” Two months after Roosevelt’s inauguration, the New York Times reporter Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote that the atmosphere in Washington was “strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts, of Moscow at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan.… America today literally asks for orders.”

And Roosevelt was prepared to give those orders. In his inaugural address he proclaimed:

If we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army.… I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis — broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

Fortunately, American institutions did not collapse. The Supreme Court declared some New Deal measures unconstitutional. Some business leaders resisted it. Intellectuals on both the right and the left, some of whom ended up in the early libertarian movement, railed against Roosevelt. Republican politicians (those were the days!) tended to oppose both the flow of power to Washington and the shift to executive authority. But we’re being reminded again, in Washington as well as Moscow and Beijing and Budapest and Istanbul, that liberal institutions are always threatened by populism and authoritarianism and especially the combination of the two.

“Gabriel Over the White House” will air on TCM on April 27.

It’s often been noted that regulations can impose larger relative costs on small businesses and can serve to protect incumbent firms from new competitors. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein noted that new regulations created a “moat” around his firm:

That all industries are being disrupted to some extent by new entrants coming in from technology. We, again, being, you know, technology-oriented ourselves, try to disrupt ourselves and try to figure out what’s the new thing, and come up with new platforms, new forms of distribution, new products. But in some ways, and there are some parts of our business, where it’s very hard for outside entrants to come in, disrupt our business, simply because we’re so regulated. You’ll hear people in our industry talk about the regulation. And they talk about it, you know, with a sigh: Look at the burdens of regulation. But in some cases, the burdensome regulation acts as a bit of a moat around our business.

The Washington Post reports on a new example: the legalized marijuana market in California. Libertarians have long urged the legalization of marijuana and other drugs. Certainly I expect better results from a legal regime where people are not arrested for buying, selling, or using marijuana. But governments can’t just repeal laws and stop arresting people; instead, they prefer to set up a regime of taxes and regulation. And that’s having an effect on the small marijuana growers in the state’s “Emerald Triangle.” As Scott Wilson reports in the Post:

Humboldt County, traditionally shorthand for outlaw culture and the great dope it produces, is facing a harsh reckoning. Every trait that made this strip along California’s wild northwest coast the best place in the world to grow pot is now working against its future as a producer in the state’s $7 billion-a-year marijuana market.

A massive industry never before regulated is being tamed by laws and taxation, characteristically extensive in this state. Nowhere is this process upending a culture and economy more than here in Humboldt, where tens of thousands of people who have been breaking the law for years are being asked to hire accountants, tax lawyers and declare themselves to a government they have famously distrusted. 

Cato adjunct scholar Leland B. Yeager had a long career at the University of Virginia Department of Economics in its golden age and later at Auburn University. He is the author of Foreign Trade and U.S. Policy: The Case for Free International Trade (1976), International Monetary Relations: Theory, History and Policy (1976), and Free Trade: America’s Opportunity (1954). At 93 he is still as insightful and as blunt as ever, and he just published this critique of President Trump’s understanding of trade policy at Liberty magazine under the title “Profound and Destructive.” The whole thing is reprinted below.

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In his new book Enlightenment Now and in his McLaughlin Lecture at the Cato Institute this week, Steven Pinker made the point that we may fail to appreciate how much progress the world has made because the news is usually about bad and unusual things. For instance, he said, quoting Max Roser, if the media truly reported the important changes in the world, “they could have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last twenty-five years.”

This is understandable. As Pinker writes, 

News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where  a war has not broken out”—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billions of smartphones turn most of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

And among the things that do happen, the positive and negative ones unfold on different time lines. The news, far from being a “first draft of history,” is closer to play-by-play sports commentary. It focuses on discrete events, generally those that took place since the last edition (in earlier times, the day before; now, seconds before). Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day,  and as they unfold, they  will be out of sync with the news cycle. The peace researcher John Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century of celebrity gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.

I’ve noted this myself. I think the mainstream media such as NPR, which I listen to morning and evening, fail to adequately examine the most important fact in modern history—what Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Fact, the enormous and continuing increase in human longevity and living standards since the industrial revolution. If you listen to NPR or read the New York Times, you’ll be well informed about the news in general and about problems such as racism, sexism, and environmental disaster. But you won’t often be reminded that we are the richest, most comfortable, best-fed, longest-lived people in history. Or as Indur Goklany put it in a book title, you won’t hear about The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet.

Pinker does point out, “Information about human progress, though absent from major news outlets and intellectual forums, is easy enough to find. The data are not entombed in dry reports but are displayed in gorgeous Web sites, particularly Max Roser’s Our World in Data, Marian Tupy’s HumanProgress, and Hans Rosling’s Gapminder.” But of course those aren’t the major media. Which is why, he says, “And here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.”

So what if the media did report the most important news, the Great Fact? I asked Cato intern Thasos Athens to help me envision that: