In 1927 a group of intellectuals set sail on an ocean liner for Europe and Asia. The overall objective of their trip was to gather information about the great Bolshevik experiment in Russia. Two of these men were Stuart Chase and f.J. Schlink, the founders of Consumer Reports magazine. Another was a peace activist named Roger Baldwin who had founded the ACLU. Union men, magazine writers, and of course, college professors, made up the rest of the band.
Taking a trip to a foreign land in search of confirmation for one's progressive ideals may sound naive to our modern ears. In fact, such trips are now passe, and even expected of America's "elite" intellectuals. Who from that era doesn't remember Jane Fonda's trip to Viet Nam, or more recently Jimmy Carter's visit with Fidel Castro in the early 2000's, or even Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in the middle east?
I love international travel. Foreign cultures, cuisines, geography, history, and especially the people are fascinating and wonderful. I highly recommend international experience to anyone as a fundamental part of their education. There is very little one can do to learn so much so fast, get large doses of a different culture, and the ever-popular-but-still-true broadening of one's horizons. I was fortunate enough to live for an entire season in East Asia and learned some language, forged some lifelong friendships, and gained invaluable lessons.
Things are different when such trips are taken for the purpose of confirming already held misconceptions, however. Under such circumstances, learning can't help but be hampered. This is because the lesson begins with stubbornly held and unexamined assumptions. Observations serve to confirm opinions instead of leading one to truth. For the distinguished passengers on the trip to Russia in 1927, Stalin began rounding people up, shipping them off to the gulags, and executing them even as the intellectuals sailed home with stars in their eyes and visions of government interference and control in America. They had been given a "dog and pony" show and bought it hook, line, and sinker. One of the travelers, in refering to his trip to Russia, had the blindness to write, "I have seen the future, and it works."
The trends were aligned with these intellectuals in that age. It didn't take long for them, the people they supported, and the candidates they advanced to begin implementing more and more government control on the American public. The advance soldier in that process, unwittingly, was President Herbert Hoover. Confident of his own ability to take ahold of the controls of government, he used the scare of the drop in the stock market of 1929 (which was not an emergency, did not shut down banks, and did not cause more suicides than New York had experienced even in the previous year; to explode just a few of the myths of that time) to begin meddling in industry and municipalities. A normal correction in an inflated exchange after a decade of real, substantial, economic growth (backed by actual expansion in GNP, GDP, and capital and productive capabilities, one of the largest growth decadees in American history) was perfectly normal. The real question isn't what caused the temporary drop in aggregate stock values in October of 1929; the real question is why did the trouble persist so long after it happened? AND, why was there in fact a Depression within a Depression? (1933 and 1934 being worse than 1929 and 1930).
That brings us back to our "boatload of meddlers" and their trip to Russia. Men of their ilk were duped into believing all the emerging economic theories of their time; theories that all involved faulty economic assumptions and recommended more and more governmental interference in the money supply, markets, international trade, and spending. This meddling is what caused the runs on banks. This meddling is what took a small incident and prolonged it. This meddling is what stretched a short, normal, economic correction into an international catastrophe.
The actions of the following decades would usher in the "triumph of the welfare state" concept that still haunts us today. This is the idea that the government knows best, is responsible for fixing all problems, and can and should intermix itself in the affairs of economics and enterprise.
What happened in the late 20's and throughout the 30's is akin to a patient with a head cold getting advice from an over-reactive doctor. Based on some new, exciting techniques just picked up by the doctor at an international conference, the doctor administers drugs that don't treat the cold but make it worse. Seeing this, the good doctor, surrounded and encouraged by other doctors doing the same thing, confidently administers even more medicine. Only this time, there are additional side effects. The doctor, however, doesn't see it that way. Instead, he sees confirmation of just how sick this patient was in the first place and, gee whiz, good thing there's a doctor on the scene to help! Further meds produce more side effects and soon the situation is drastic. Emergency life support measures are required or else the patient will surely die. The patient is not really living any longer, strapped to the tubes and machines of life support as he is, but he is not dead either. This encourages the doctor and his colleagues to congratulate themselves on keeping such a terminal patient alive and strengthens their resolve to formalize the life support system. It is at this point that the doctors can't believe their ears when someone has the audacity to suggest that perhaps the patient never needed anything other than a chance to recover from his cold naturally. "As sick as he is?" they cry, "you non-doctors are so naive!"
This analogy is not meant to reflect poorly on doctors at all. It is directed at the intellectuals in government that operate under the false assumption that bureaucrats in Washington know better than our founding fathers, the forces of the free market that got us our prosperity in the first place, and the proven concept of representative government and individual freedom.
We have no need to take junkets to foreign countries looking for gold in their government strategies. We need merely look to our own effective history. Groping around for new strategies and forming more and more government agencies is only killing the patient. We need fresh air. We need a little space to live naturally. We need freedom. Perhaps the intellectuals in Washington should hail a cab, take a trip to the Library of Congress, and read our founding documents. That would be a worthy junket!
Update: you will see in the comments below some quotes from long-time loyal reader Cathy. This one hit me so hard I just had to add it to the body of this article (Thanks Cathy!):
William James is attributed to have said, "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
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