MeanMrMustard's Musings: Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones ...

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones ...

... but words will never hurt me. Unless, of course, those words are in one of the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries" as compiled by those fine conservative brains over at HumanEventsOnline.com.

(I use the terms "fine" and "brains" loosely. The panel consisted of 14 conservative men and Phyllis Schlafly. They must've had a real fun time casting those secret ballots, nudge nudge wink wink.)

Of course, the usual suspects are mentioned: Marx & Engels, Darwin, Kinsey, Friedan. But given the current political climate, I think it's a horrible oversite that they failed to single out 1913's Social Insurance or 1934's The Quest for Security, works by my relative, I.M. Rubinow, that were seminal in the Social Security movement.

Be that as it may, can we laugh a little at calling Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Ralph Nader's Unsafe At Any Speed "harmful books" (they're on the "honorable mention" list)? I suppose if your definition of "harmful" is limited exclusively to major corporations and deliberately exclusive of life forms, well, perhaps it makes sense.

The most ridiculous moment on the list, though, appears in the one-paragraph critique of John Maynard Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money:

The book is a recipe for ever-expanding government. When the business cycle threatens a contraction of industry, and thus of jobs, he argued, the government should run up deficits, borrowing and spending money to spur economic activity. FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.

For those who haven't been paying attention, the vast majority of the debt was amassed in budgets submitted by Reagan, Bush I and Bush II; that's FDR waaaaay over there on the left in the graphic below. They kinda sorta forgot to mention that part.