Robert Higgs Quotes
Some doomsayers think the collapse will be triggered by runaway government spending, excessive taxation, oppressive regulation, food shortages, fuel shortages or natural disasters such as deadly pandemics or lethal changes in the world's climate.
Higgs, Robert. "Apocalyptic Rhetoric Aside, a Government Default Will Not Destroy Society." The Beacon, Independent Institute, 27 July 2011.
Conservatives are surprised to learn that their great economic nemesis was one of the early economists who saw the danger of paper money and government control over the minting of money which is one of their core concerns.
This quotation is fascinating because it illustrates the degree to which the Southern people censored themselves on what in most cultures would be morale issues. In many ways the ability to ignore reality made it easier for the Confederate government to operate, but distorted the decisions that were made. Arguably, in most other cultures, public opinion on the reality of the situation would have brought the war to an end sooner and ironically on far better terms than they ended up with. Eggleston was an accomplished writer who had served in the Confederate army of the Civil War. 20 year after the war he wrote a series of articles for the prestigious Northern Atlantic Monthly trying to convey the war from the Southerner’s point of view.
The reference was to the New Orleans Katrina Crisis of 2005.
He was responding to the Democratic Slogan, “You never had it so good.” Over 50 years later the Democrats would be lamenting the Republican administration of George W. Bush for the huge debt and the fighting of the war in Iraq. This quotation is an excellent illustration of the fact that the two American political parties “flip-flop” positions over time to accommodate whether they are governing or in opposition. By 2005, the Republicans were in support of high deficits as they had produced the largest debt in American History. In the 1950s, Republican doctrine was to condemn all government deficits. And Republicans were the party of peace and the democrats were more aggressive in foreign policy. 50 years later, it was the Democrats calling for an end to the fighting (Iraq) and the Republicans supporting the war. Over the same period, the other two issues, taxes and inflation are still republican issues.
Robert Higgs is an American economic historian and economist combining material from Public Choice, the New institutional economics, and the Austrian school of economics; and describes himself as a "libertarian anarchist" in political and legal theory and public policy. His writings in economics and economic history have most often focused on the causes, means, and effects of government power and growth.
