Phil Gramm And Don Boudreaux Address Seven Major Economic Myths
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The front page of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper with the headline ‘Wall St. In Panic As Stocks … More Crash’, published on the day of the initial Wall Street Crash of ‘Black Thursday’, 24th October 1929. (Photo by FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Getty Images The rain was heavy for parts of last weekend in the Washington, D.C. area. Seeing it coming down in sheets, it got me thinking about how people used to live. How awful it must have been in the days of primitive construction. Everything must have always been damp, moldy, buggy, and surely worse than that. Surely is operative here, and was confirmed in The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Great Myths of Capitalism, a new book co-authored by former U.S. Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) and George Mason University economics professor Donald Boudreaux. Gramm and Boudreaux brought harsh coloring to what was merely imagined. In their chapter addressing the popular notion that the Industrial Revolution impoverished workers, they cite (among others) historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee’s description of it as “a period as disastrous and as terrible as any through which a nation ever passed.” Philosopher Bertrand Russell asserted that the Industrial Revolution “caused unspeakable misery in both England and America.” Where it becomes both comical and sad, Gramm and Boudreaux relay that noted class warrior Thomas Piketty uses the poetry of Thomas Hood and the fiction of Charles Dickens as “’evidence’” of the Industrial Revolution’s brutality. As Piketty sees it, the cruelty of commercial progress “’did not spring from the imagination of their authors.’” Gramm and Boudreaux reject the consensus. They write that “by every available economic measure,” the Industrial Revolution marked the “beginning of a golden age of material well-being – especially for workers.” It had to be. The movement of people is…
Filed under: News - @ June 18, 2025 9:28 pm