I recall seeing this on C-SPAN in 2002, on the original air date I believe. In it, Professor Alder gives insight into the bizarre ways of French price structure, weights and measures just before their creation of the Metric System. See the whole presentation of The Measure of All Things on C-SPAN.
During Jonah Goldberg's recent book promotion tour for his latest, The Tyranny of Cliches, he has spoken frequently of the misquotation of Marie Antoinette saying "let them eat cake." His description of the true story, at least what is left of it now, reminded me of Prof. Alder's book and presentation from ten years ago. In the century before Marie Antoinette, the French had laws that required bakers to sell expensive bread (egg based brioche, for example) at the same price as lower priced breads if they ran out of the less expensive varieties.
Fast forward to the French Revolution and a slightly different, but equally bad pricing system existed: 'Fair' or 'Just Price.'
Brian Lamb had a great Q & A with Blaine Harden (video link) last night on C-SPAN about Harden's book "Escape from Camp 14". Here is a dump from the C-SPAN web page:
Shin Dong-hyuk
Washington, DC
Sunday, April 29, 2012
This week on Q&A, author Blaine Harden discusses his historical narrative "Escape From Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West." Harden tells the story of a young man named Shin Dong-hyuk, who was born in captivity at prison camp 14, located in central North Korea. Shin escaped in 2005. Harden says that Shin is the only individual actually born in a labor camp to escape. In his book, Harden explains that Camp 14 holds approximately fifteen thousand prisoners and is the toughest of six camps in the country because of the brutal working conditions and vigilance of the guards. He relates how Shin witnessed the execution of his mother and brother, whom he had reported to guards after overhearing them discuss the possibility of escape. He was severely beaten and tortured for information about his mother and brother until he convinced the guards that he had turned them in to authorities as required. Harden details Shin's escape through an electrified fence by climbing over a dead companion's body and his hazardous journey through China into South Korea. Harden talks about the process Shin undertook to learn about society and civilization, and how he ended up meeting him in 2008 while writing a story for The Washington Post. In addition, Mr. Harden discusses his early career as a writer and his motivations for becoming a journalist.
Blaine Harden currently reports for PBS Frontline and contributes to The Economist. He was a correspondent for the Washington Post in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as in New York and Seattle. He was also a national correspondent for The New York Times and a writer for Time Magazine. He won the Ernie Pyle Award for coverage of the siege in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two children.
It sounds like a great story and I found some video of Harden and Shin that I will post here later posted below. It was hard for me to find anything to object to in the interview, save one quibble. Harden kept calling the North Korean regimes afterKim Il-sungtotalitarian. Perhaps under sloppy modern usage of totalitarian it is true, but the more accurate word would be dictatorship. Harden correctly points out that Kim Il-sung was a popular leader when his regime began. That is totalitarian in the Mussolini style of totalitarian, all in this together, stronger together than individually, etc.
However, at some point in the Kim Il-sung regime that totalitarianism was no longer a universal free choice and became a dictatorship. Certainly every moment under Kim Jong-Il was a dictatorship, as with his successor Kim Jong-un.
For more on this story, go to National Review Online and read: A Child of the North Korean Gulag Shin Dong-hyuk flees Camp 14 in search of meat.
First, from the description - Little is known about the prison camps of North Korea where it is estimated that 200,000 are imprisoned. Bullshit. The prison camps of North Korea are some of the best documented operating camps in the history of the world. Little was known about the Soviet Gulags before Khrushchev made his 'secret speech' and little was known about German concentration camps before they were liberated. Today, we have 30,000 North Koreans who have escaped and now live in Seoul. Several prison camp escapees live in Seoul right now, willing to talk about the inner workings of the camps and satellite photos of the camps are available from Google Earth.
Another objection I have is to Harden's introduction and slide show. He claims that Red China stopped being "totalitarian" after Mao. He uses totalitarian interchangeably for things that can better be described as authoritarian or dictatorial, which Red China still is to this day.
The big difference between the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag system or the North Korean Gulag system is simple: Socialism cleanses all sins with "fellow travelers" who write the news today. They denied the Soviet system, even after Khrushchev's speech was leaked to the world, they ignored the Red Chinese version and they ignore this while they bitch and whine about the National Rifle Association and create an imagined American Gulag constructed with lies:
One of the persistent myths perpetuated by both Socialistic academics and their news writing mouth pieces alike is the myth of the New Deal ending the Great Depression. Even though there is ample evidence against that notion, even though the most casual observation indicates that it is patently false.
Jim Powell, Michale Barone (C-SPAN Video) and others have researched this extensively. The only reply that the socialists can give is "everybody knows that FDR ended the Great Depression." Well, there is something to the socialistic/Keynesian view in that everybody who attended government run schools in the English speaking world has had this myth beaten into their noggins.
Here is another item exposing the truth about the FDR myth:
FDR's New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression
A groundbreaking study by UCLA economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian demonstrates that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s excessively pro-labor, anti-competitive New Deal actually prolonged for seven long years the severe economic pain immortalized in John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath.”
Using 1929 data, the two researchers calculated what wages and prices would have been had without the New Deal, and then compared them to actual wages and prices at the time. Their findings were startling: In 11 key industries, actual wages averaged 25 percent higher than market conditions warranted, but unemployment was also 25 percent higher as well. Meanwhile, the New Deal pushed up prices 23 percent higher than they should have been, so consumers couldn’t afford to buy, leading to even more unemployment.
Cole and Ohanian blame FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act for “short-circuiting the market’s self-correcting forces.” Instead of stimulating the economy, they argue, FDR managed to depress it even further. Without government intervention, the Great Depression would have ended in 1936 instead of 1943. If FDR unnecessarily prolonged the Great Depression, thank the Federal Reserve Bank for starting it. Current Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke conceded the central bank’s culpability in a Nov. 8, 2002 speech honoring University of Chicago free market economist Milton Friedman on his 90th birthday.
"Daniel Ortega is one peasant who never worked on a farm, but expropriated quite a few of them." - Tom Wolfe
This CSPAN video of Tom Wolfe, Remarks by Tom Wolfe, is the video I was looking for in my research for How Many Borders Would You Like With That Socialism? and the relevant portion begins at the 21 minute mark. He talks about life in the South Bronx, New York, when he was researching Bonfire of the Vanities, with interesting details about the 1980s and 90s drug trade, tastes of both rich and poor, and other aspects of the area.
He also speaks of a social club in the Bronx at 28:20, the portion I remember and why I looked for this speech.
