Anatomy of Revolution: The Rule of the Moderates

Having described the different types of revolutionists, Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution now looks at the rule of the moderates, and why it always seems to be doomed to failure.

At the outset of revolution, the moderates seem to be just the right people to take over; even in Russia in February 1917 when moderates, led by Prince Lvov, took power.

The problem is that the moderates are faced with an impossible task: keeping a government going, writing a new constitution, and usually confronted with a foreign war. And they are confronted with the extremists,

who insisted that the moderates were trying to stop the revolution, that they had betrayed it, that they were as bad as the rulers of the old regime -- indeed, much worse, since they were traitors as well as fools and scoundrels.

And the result is that the radicals end up taking power. Even in the American Revolution, it was the radicals that won, in the Declaration of Independence. There is something about the revolutionary process that leaves moderates in the dust.

In the English Revolution the revolutionaries, the Parliamentarians, were divided roughly into three: an Episcopalian group that were almost Royalists: a moderate group, "Presbyterian in religion, puritan in ethics," constitutional monarchists at heart; and extremists, the Independents, extreme Calvinists. They Indpendents made themselves effective through their control of the New Model Army. The Independents were the most ideological, and under Cromwell they won the revolution.

In the American Revolution there were Loyalists that really didn't have a problem with the royal government, the moderate merchants that started the agitation with their opposition to the Stamp Act, and the radicals with their committees of correspondence and committees of safety "exhibited extraordinary technical skill in the practical politics of revolution" and organized the Continental Congress. in 1774.

In the French Revolution the Royalists were dispatched almost immediately, Moderates like Mirabeau, Lafayette, and the Lameths were opposed by radicals Pétion, Robespierre, Danton, and Brissot. But then war broke out with Austria and Prussia, France was invaded and the radicals threw out the monarchy in an attack on the Tuileries Palace in August 1792. When it came to try the King, the moderates were divided, and so the radicals, "better organized, more aggressive, and perhaps more unscrupulous," won absolute power.

In the Russian Revolution the first government was supported mostly by Kadets, the left-wing of pre-revolutionary Russia. But it fell over the question of continuing the war to support the "imperialist" allies. It was followed by a Socialist government, accused by the Bolsheviks of being "compromisist," certainly moderate compared to the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks almost lost when they backed a "rising of workers in Petrograd" in July, but got their mojo back in the October Revolution when they "took over Petrograd with astonishingly little difficulty and almost no bloodshed."

Brinton explains the victory of the radicals according to a theory of "dual sovereignty," that a parallel illegal government was growing alongside the official, legal government, and eventually acquired enough power to stage a coup and take over. This occurred twice in the English Revolution where the legal government of King Charles was overthrown by the Long Parliament, and again, the Parliament was overthrown by the New Model Army. In the American Revolution this is obscured somewhat because men adhering to the illegal government often served in the legal town councils and colonial legislatures. In the French Revolution the radicals slowly increased their control of Jacobin Clubs. In the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks slowly gained control of the various soviets -- literally "councils" -- set up after the 1905 rising that ended up constituting a rival government. The point is that in each revolution the extremists were able to construct a rival illegal government network that, at the critical moment could seize power from the legal government.

The weakness of the moderates derives mostly from the difficulty of suppressing the radicals without seeming to be the enemy of the revolution, a situation that all the radical groups exploited, up until the radicals seized power and declared and enforced an end to politics. In other words, if you want to win a revolution, then opposition politics ends on the day that you take power. If you are a moderate and believe in a fair and free discussion of the issues, this is impossible to bring off.

Next: Accession of the Extremists and Reign of Terror.

Anatomy of Revolution: First Stages and the Types of Revolutionists

Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution now looks at the events surrounding the breakout of revolution, the combination of factors that lead to open defiance and replacement of the old regime.

He begins with Figaro, the barber of Beaumarchais' plays, and his devastating critique of the old regime in Marriage of Figaro. He notes that, "after much vacillation, the censor did not stop Beaumarchais' play."

But in all four revolutions, the old regime, with its vacillations and half-hearted attempts at putting down revolution rather indicate the regime lacked the tyrannous instinct it was reputed to have.

But how did the revolutions begin? With a bang or with a whimper? The revolutionaries preferred the bang theory.

History has tended to mark the battle of Concord as the shot heard round the world, and people marveled at the Fall of the Bastille, but it is not clear just when those revolutions began. But the fall of the Czarist regime following riots in Petrograd in March 1917 seems to be the unquestionable start of revolution. 

The English revolution exhibits more of a rolling start, with King Charles dissolving Parliament in 1629 and disastrously summoning it in 1640 when he was going bankrupt. Pretty soon one thing led to another and in 1642 both Parliament and the King were raising armies.

In America there is a good argument that revolution began with the Stamp Act in 1765 which led to "a series of clashes with increasingly well-organized groups of Americans." Or perhaps it began with the Continental Congress in 1774 or the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775 or the glorious Fourth of July in 1776.

In France there was no Parliament to focus resistance, but there was the Parlement of Paris, a kind of aristocratic supreme court, that led to "a dramatic defiance of royal power and the forced exile of the judges." Then the Assembly of Notables in 1787 led to the summoning of the Estates-General in 1789. But the Third Estate decided not to conduct business unless the Estates-General were called the "National Assembly." And then the King yielded.

Was it all planned by committees of malcontents, or a nation rising spontaneously to smite its oppressors? Brinton opts for a bit of both. The Bolshevik narrative is that it was all carefully planned, the other revolution narratives propose a spontaneous uprising. 

Clearly, the occasion of revolution arose when "the existing government attempted to raise money from people who refused to pay." Also, it is clear that after the first clash between the old regime and the party of opposition, there ensues a "brief period of joy and hope... the... charming honeymoon of that impossible pair, the Real and the Ideal." Yet was the Bastille a spontaneous response to the dismissal of Necker, or the scheming of freemasons, philosophes, and professional agitators? Brinton proposes a gardening metaphor, that

revolutions do grow from seeds sown by men who want change, but that these men do do a lot of skillful gardening, but that the gardeners are not working against nature but rather in soil and in a climate propitious to their work; and that the final fruits represent a collaboration between men and nature.

What is weird is that in all four revolutions, when it came to the first outbreak of violence, the old regime government was caught flat-footed. Each government totally flubbed its response to the provocation. The authorities responded to the violence, of course,

but in each case with a striking lack of success. Those of the ruling class responsible for such responses in all our societies proved signally unable to make adequate use of force.

In the case of the English revolution, King Charles didn't really have an army to put down the rebellious Parliament. In the case of America, the attempts to put down the rebels actually encouraged them. In the case of the Fall of the Bastille, numerous soldiers actually joined the rioters. In the case of the Russian revolution the soldiers joined the rioters as well, and the railway workers refused to allow the Czar to travel by train.

When the first stages of the revolutions were successful, enlightened people all over the world were delighted. But having won the first battle, 

It has now become the government, and is facing a new set of problems. When it actually gets to work on these problems the honeymoon is soon over.

Because there are all kinds of different revolutionists. And, although both supporters and opponents of revolutions tend to imagine revolutionaries as uniquely good or uniquely bad, they are not that different from ordinary people. 

Brinton himself wrote a book about The Jacobins in the French Revolution and found that and found that about two-thirds were middle class, a quarter were working class, and less then 10 percent were peasants. Average age of members was about 40, They represented, the abler, more ambitious, and successful."

In the English revolution the revolutionists were often merchants, great lords, and small landowning gentry, like Cromwell himself. They were not riffraff. In the American revolution, it was the merchants that first organizes opposition to the Crown. There were disreputable street fighters, but also respectable yeoman farmers. In Russia almost everyone from liberal noble to businessman to professional to working man and kulak was eager to see the back of the Czar.

The leaders of the French revolution ranged from nobles like the Duc d'Orleans, lawyers, scientists, journalists. In the American revolution over half the signers of the Declaration of Indpendence had college degrees. Sam Adams, scion of a merchant family, went to Harvard. The leaders of the English revolution pretty well all came from the highest ranks of society. The leaders of the Russian revolution also included nobles and professionals. Lenin was the son of a school inspector, and Stalin, of peasant-artisan stock, went to a seminary for a while.

The revolutionists were not uniquely successful men or desperate failures. They came from all walks of life, and displayed a whole range of talents.

In other words, 

it makes almost as many kinds of men and women to make a revolution as to make a world...They certainly create a number of empty spaces to fill, and give an opportunity to clever young men who may also be unscrupulous... But they do not re-crate mankind, nor so they eve make use of a completely new and hitherto suppressed set of men and women.

The rank and file are ordinary men and women, and not "riffraff, scoundrels, scum of the earth." The ability of the leaders "is certainly very high." The fact that in the crisis periods of revoluion some very nasty stuff happens, is probably the effect of the emergency on men rather than men creating an extraordinary emergency.

Next: The Rule of the Moderates.

Anatomy of Revolution: The Old Regimes

After setting up his "conceptual scheme" that revolution is a "fever" Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution looks at the Old Regimes of the four revolutions under analysis: British, American, French, and Russian.

Disorder and conflict are not uncommon in all societies. Brinton cites Sorokin in his Social and Cultural Dynamics who cites in England "one hundred and sixty-two 'internal disturbances in intragroup relationships' between 656 and 1921." That's one every eight years. In other words there are likely to be too many symptoms of breakdown in any society to please the analyst of revolution.

First of all, what about the economic situation? The main item of contention was government finances. In England they argued about "Ship Money, benevolences, tonnage and poundage"; in colonial America, they didn't want to pay for the Seven Years War; in France the revolution-friendly Estates-General was called because of the government's financial problems; in Russia "the Czarist regime had achieved an all-around collapse in all fields of government activity." And everyone thought their government was incompetent.

Notice it is the government that was in trouble. In all four societies, the people were doing OK economically: Stuart England was definitely more prosperous than Elizabethan England; in America "the early years of the 1770 were distinctly years of prosperity"; "France in 1789  was a very striking example of a rich society with an impoverished government"; even in Russia, aside from the government breakdown, things were looking up.

But plenty of people thought that the government was hindering them: in America the Stamp Act and Navigation Act and the incorporation of the lands west of the Allegheny into Canada; in France tax-reform offended the privileged and the un-privileged, and tariff reductions with England increased unemployment in Normandy.

Of course, the intellectuals were all against the government. But then they usually are. Victorian intellectuals were "united apparently in nothing but a profound dislike for their environment." But no revolution. But in ancien régime France,

One has the impression of immense numbers of intellectuals... all convinced that the world, and especially France, needs making over from the tiniest and more insignificant details to the most general moral and legal principles.

In Russia, being a writer or teacher "meant being against the government." In America, there was no such unity. But the Enlightenment, with Locke and Montesquieu, introduced the "natural and inalienable rights of man." England in the Stuart era was drenched in pamphlets -- in an era before newspapers -- all busy discussing "religion or politics," or both.

What these intellectuals were selling was "another and better world than that of the corrupt and inefficient old regimes." In England they called the ruling class "Normans" after the Norman Conquest; in France they liked to brand the nobility as Franks, descendants of barbarous Germans; in Russia the nobles were all "Varangians, or Tartar or Western": foreigners.

But did the intellectuals cause the revolutions? Brinton is clear: "No ideas, no revolution." But that does not mean that the ideas caused the revolution.

What about class conflict? Such "feelings of dislike" occur in all societies, but are seldom as simple as "bourgeois vs. feudal or bourgeois vs. proletariat." But there is no question that "the ruling class seems in all four of our societies to be divided and inept." In a healthy society the lower orders probably "dream rather of joining them rather than dislodging them." And when members of the ruling class "begin to believe that they hold power unjustly, or that all men are brothers," etc., they are probably not long for this world.

In Russia, the nobility had been "bemoaning the futility of life, the backwardness of Russia," and so on. And when they used force, "they used it sporadically and inefficiently." In France ruling class members "discussing the cause of discontented or repressed classes -- upperdogs voluntarily siding with underdogs." And in Stuart England there were the Cavaliers, "romantic even to themselves."

Except perhaps in America, we find the ruling classes in the old regimes markedly divided, markedly unsuited to fulfill the functions of a ruling class.

 Also, many in the ruling class were in a shaky economic position. They had opted for "finer houses, finer clothes" but still lived off their agricultural rents.

And the middle classes hated the upper class. They "felt morally superior to their aristocracies" and, in France by the end of the 18th century, no longer wanted to join the aristocracy, but abolish it. In England this was partly the effect of the artisan classes being "won over to Puritanism."

The lower classes seemed to hate the upper class more than usual. But "trustworthy materials... are scarce."

Was there any particular resistance to talent rising to the top? There is some indication of the French nobility "tightening its lines." In Russia, the nobility "closed the very highest social honors to plebeian talent." Still, the expanding economies permitted plenty of people to rise.

But not to the top.

[T]he countries were "run" by other, and privileged beings, and from the highest social distinctions the bourgeoisie as a class were hopelessly excluded.

"Where wealth... cannot buy everything.. you have a fairly reliable preliminary sign of revolution." Still, "The actual revolution is always a surprise."

Next: First Stages and Types of Revolutionists.

Anatomy of Revolution: Introduction

The Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton is a comparative study of the four great European revolutions: English, American, French, and Russian. They are not necessarily "typical" but they are four important revolutions about which Brinton proposes to try to observe parallels.

He does not expect to divine the truth of these revolutions; he is a Kantian, and does not expect to find the truth, the thing-in-itself. Nor is the book about the "facts." But he does propose to use a "conceptual scheme" to approach the analysis of the four revolutions, which he will use to frame questions and hypotheses about them, and facts, but not rigidity. And he hopes to steer clear of wishful thinking about "what he would like to prevail" with respect to the four revolutions.

But what conceptual scheme? The notion of a storm, starting with rumblings, building to a thunderous climax, and then subsiding back into sunshine? The notion of equilibrium, of a society getting out of equilibrium and then rocking to and fro before returning to some sort of equilibrium?

Brinton chooses the conceptual scheme of a "fever." In the old regime, 

there will be found signs of the coming disturbance... Then comes a time when the full symptoms disclose themselves, and when we can say that the fever of revolution has begun. This works up... to a crisis, frequently accompanied by delirium, the rule of the most violent revolutionists, the Reign of Terror. After the crisis comes a period of convalescence, and the patient is himself again,

and maybe "strengthened by the experience... perhaps in some respects stronger for it[.]" But, in later chapters, he also uses the notion, as in "disequilibrium" as a sign of regime ill health.

Three of the four revolutions, the British, the French, and the Russian, have a "social or class" basis.

All are begun in hope and moderation, all reach a crisis in a reign of terror, and all end in something like dictatorship -- Cromwell, Bonaparte, Stalin.

The American Revolution is different. It was "predominantly a territorial and nationalistic revolution, animated by patriotic American hatred for the British." But it had a social, class character, and had "some terroristic aspects." It does not fit quite as well into the "fever" conceptual scheme.

There will be no "great discoveries," Brinton warns, and the reader should expect the anatomy of revolutions to yield familiar results. The uniformities in four the revolutions will turn out to be "just what every sensible man already knew about revolutions." 

Next: The Old Regimes.

Censoring "Misinformation:" Don't Do It!

Why are our rulers so bent upon censoring "misinformation?" As a Thoroughly Modern Millie that believes in the truth of Critical Theory -- the original truth, that you cannot know things-in-themselves, so every fact and every truth is subject to change -- I can't believe that our wise rulers want to censor non-regime narratives.

We've seen, in living color over the last year, how the narrative changes.

First of all, masks didn't work. Then they did. Now it seems that masks don't make a blind bit of difference. Probably.

Then hydroxychloroquine, a non-prescription drug for malaria seemed like a good idea, then it wasn't because Trump, and now it seems to work. Ditto Ivermectin. But did you know that hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin are over-the-counter drugs and so Big Pharma doesn't make too much money on them?

Eric Erickson has more details on all the changing narratives.

Why do governments -- and religions -- insist on a single narrative, and label conflicting information as "misinformation" and "heresy." Why do they think that there is a good reason to block annoying voices that challenge the official narrative?

I suspect that it has something to do, first, with military culture, because once the military leader has decided upon a route of march or a tactic or an attack, then it would be disastrous in the short term to keep debating the options.

I also suspect that it has something to do with the female culture, where all the women in the community pretty well agree on things. And any woman that does not agree finds that nobody will talk to her.

There is also, of course, the shabby reason that most of politics is about division, shaming the opposition, and getting on with the loot and plunder. So the sauntering politician does not like to have his narrative or his policy questioned, because that challenges his status as glorious leader.

You can see that in the recent flap about the Biden administration wanting to silence several voices that were challenging its policy on COVID, particularly the efficacy of vaccination. The Biden administration and all good people want everyone to get vaccinated. Because science.

But there's a lot of pushback out there, from various quarters, suggesting that the vaccination doesn't stop transmission, doesn't stop you from getting reinfected, has serious side effects. From the point of view of the rulers, this is all dangerous misinformation -- insurrection even! Michael Barone:

[Biden press secretary Jan Psaki] called on Facebook to suppress 12 accounts that she said were spreading "misinformation" about COVID-19 vaccines. These accounts, she said July 15, were "producing 65% of vaccine misinformation on social media platforms."

"Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful, violative posts. Posts that would be within their policy for removal often remain up for days, and that's too long. The information spreads too quickly."

Well, maybe. If we assume that the Biden administration is really leveling with us, and really knows its stuff, and really has the science straight and is not just playing politics with us. 

See, the reason we have a First Amendment and the reason we have LEDs is that back in the day our rulers agreed that nobody had a monopoly on the truth, and that anyone that did have a monopoly on truth would abuse that monopoly. Just like monopolists in the business world.

And that is what Critical Theory was about, before lefties decided to turn it into a political weapon. Critical Theory says that your brilliant theory of "life, the universe, and everything" may explain everything so far, but what about tomorrow? That is why the physicists' union demands "rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty."

Now, the theory of the moment with respect to the COVID epidemic and the response to it is obviously not a theory with the prestige of Newton's mechanics, or Einstein's relativity. The government and its scientist bureaucrats are dealing with a disease about which we do not know everything we need to know. The facts change every day. And the government, like all governments, tends to be slow to change its mind when the facts change. As they do. Governments tend to stick with a narrative and demand people conform to the narrative until the day when the narrative is utterly exploded and even nice liberal ladies with virtue-signaling yards signs in the front yard realize it.

But I don't care. I think that the Biden administration and its Democratic operatives with bylines in the media are going to end up with egg on their faces. Because they cannot control the narrative, and shouldn't imagine that they can, or think that controlling the narrative will have a better outcome for the Biden administration, the Democratic Party, and the nation than allowing a frank and fair discussion of the science and the issues.

But what do I know?

Putin's Russian History Lesson

Let's see. What do I know about Russian history?

I know that, back in the day, the Vikings were running slaves down the Volga. I know there was a thing called the Kievan Rus. I know about the Mongols and how they rolled over Russia, leaving behind the Golden Horde.

Then I know about Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and the Nicholases.of the Romanov dynasty. And somewhere in there the Prussian Frederick the Great was fighting with Russia over Eastern Europe when he wasn't playing the flute in the evening.

And the pogroms and Fiddler on the Roof.

Then came World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War between the Reds and the Whites, followed by Lenin's New Economic Policy and Stalin's famines and purges. Then World War II and the occupation of Europe. Then the Cold War. Then the breakup of the Soviet Union into separate nations like Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, etc. Then the Russians retake the Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

And now the US is involved in stirring things up between Russia and the Ukraine and Hunter Biden is using his dad's connections to pay for his cocaine.

And that's about it.

But did you know that Vladimir Putin has just published an article about Russian history, in particular how Russia and Ukraine have united and divided over the centuries? Nor did I until prompted by "The Saker."

Putin's article is called "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians." You can see what his angle is: hey, we Russians and you Ukrainians have always been part of the same religion and the same culture going all the way back to the Ancient Rus. We should get together again!

Well, of course he does. But the article -- obviously not written by Putin -- was remarkable. Here are my takeaways:

Putin's article at least pretends to be history, rather than ideological narrative, Nikole Hannah Jones, the wokies and all the ships at sea.

Here are a couple quick takes:

• Egad, what a mess Russian history is, with all kinds of conquests, divisions, reunitings, religious divisions. 
• And what's this Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that was forever encroaching from the west into the sacred Russian lands?

Wow, I had no idea that the civil war after the Bolshevik revolution was so complicated. Not just Reds against Whites, no indeed. There were, instead, all kinds of minor political entities and rebellions and local political entities rising and falling until everything was united, by fair means and foul, into the USSR.

From the perspective of Putin, the invasion of eastern Poland in 1939 was a recovery of Russian lands.

In 1939, the USSR regained the lands earlier seized by Poland. A major portion of these became part of the Soviet Ukraine.

See back in the 19th century, says Vlad, Russia's pals to the west, Poland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were interested in stirring up the idea of a separate Ukraine. Because, of course they were.

At the same time, the idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians started to form and gain ground among the Polish elite and a part of the Malorussian intelligentsia. 

"Malorussia" means "Little Russia" and includes a lot of what is now the Ukraine. 

Since the late 19th century, the Austro-Hungarian authorities had latched onto this narrative, using it as a counterbalance to the Polish national movement and pro-Muscovite sentiments in Galicia. 

Galicia is a region between Poland and Hungary and Ukraine and includes the city of Lviv (or Lvov). Back in the day when Austrian economist (and Jewish) Ludwig von Mises was born there in 1881 Lviv was called Lemberg and was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now it is part of Ukraine.

But the really big take was that Putin aims to sound reasonable, not taking a the straight ideological line that we know and love from our lefty pals. He starts the article with this statement:

First of all, I would like to emphasize that the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space, to my mind is our great common misfortune and tragedy. These are, first and foremost, the consequences of our own mistakes made at different periods of time. But these are also the result of deliberate efforts by those forces that have always sought to undermine our unity.

Whoever imagined that a Russian leader in our lifetimes would speak with such an obvious effort at "on the one hand, on the other hand" rhetoric? I found it shocking. Or this:

Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe. Slavic and other tribes across the vast territory – from Ladoga, Novgorod, and Pskov to Kiev and Chernigov – were bound together by one language (which we now refer to as Old Russian), economic ties, the rule of the princes of the Rurik dynasty, and – after the baptism of Rus – the Orthodox faith. 

An ex-KGB guy writing in an avuncular way about Orthodox Christianity. Who woulda thunk it?

He's right, of course. You don't solidify and unify a country with reckless talk about America's or Russia's Original Sin. You talk about the shared culture, the shared sacrifice, and the shared history of the past.

Obviously, Putin wants Ukraine and Belarus back in the Russia. But so would we want to reunite the good old USA if the left coast decided to split off in the the Woke States of America.

Stay tuned. This ain't over.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT): What's the Grift?

Since we all need to know about the left's latest wizard wheeze, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), it's time to make sure we understand it and put it in the context of government finance in general and how government finance developed in history.

I understand the historical progress of government finance as follows:

Stage One: Physical Collection. This occurred in the days before Italian banks. Governments collected tribute in grain and silver from their feudal vassals, and the vassals collected the same from their underlings. But the king was always short of money. Always. Of course, if the king were conquering another country then he and his soldiers would loot and plunder the country to the bare walls. The Roman Empire ruled the world for centuries on this plan.

Stage Two: Italian Bankers. By the time of England's Edward III (reigned 1327-1377) a European monarch could borrow money for his military adventures from the leading bankers in the world: Italian bankers. Pity that Edward defaulted on his loans, and all. Maybe that's why the Brits lost the Hundred Years War and have had a soft spot for the Italians ever since.

Stage Three: Dutch Finance. In their war of independence from Spain the Dutch invented the central bank, the Exchange Bank of Amsterdam, to finance the war. It worked so well that they exported their idea and their regime to Britain and the British used the idea to win the Second Hundred Years War against the French at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The beauty of Dutch Finance is that enables the rulers to loot and plunder using the indirect method, partly through seigniorage and partly by the advantage of having its debt as the foundation of the banking system. In the 20th century the various nations used central banking and unlimited debt to fight two world wars. They could do this because they could use money printing and debt to loot their countries to the bare walls without the people rebelling.

Stage Three and a Half: Hamilton Economics. Alexander Hamilton, first US Secretary of the Treasury, ignited an economic boom when he determined to honor the war debt of the various states in the Union at par, and service the debt with new federal taxes.

Stage Three and Three Quarters: Bagehot Economics. After the Crash of 1873 Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street proposed that in the case of a credit collapse the government's central bank should act as "lender of last resort" to keep the financial system alive.

Stage Four: Keynesian Economics. After the cock-up of the Great Depression western political leaders needed a real simple strategy (like in The Manchurian Candidate) to know what to do when the economy was wrecked by a financial crash. The strategy was spend and borrow and elect, preferably with a genius like Lord Keynes in charge.

Stage Five: Bretton-Wood Economics. A big problem in the aftermath of wars conducted under Dutch Finance was "resumption," the attempt to return the value of a national currency to its pre-war value after the monetary inflation of war. After the Napoleonic Wars, the US Civil War, and World War I this resulted in "deflation" and social unrest, and usually a big credit crisis. So, after World War II the US did not resume gold payments at the pre-war level while pretending the value of the dollar was still $35 per ounce. The pretense of $35 per ounce was abandoned in 1971 by President Nixon at Camp David.

Stage Six: Supply-side Economics. After the cock-up of the inflationary 1970s politicians needed a real simple strategy to know what to do when Keynesian Economics wasn't working. The idea was to think about what government taxing and regulation was doing to actors in the economy. Maybe high marginal taxes on the rich wasn't a good idea. Notice the cunning in this strategy. It doesn't attempt to deal with the real problem, the loot and plunder of entitlement programs, but attempts some fine-tuning of the loot collection game in order to restore the economy after the stupidity of a Keynesian episode.

Stage Seven: Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). After the cock-up of the 2006-08 Great Recession -- caused by under-collateralized and non-performing home loans and a sub-standard recovery -- politicians that hated Supply-side Economics needed a real simple strategy to know what to do when Keynesian Economics wasn't working. La Wik says that MMT 

describes currency as a public monopoly and unemployment as evidence that a currency monopolist is overly restricting the supply of the financial assets needed to pay taxes and satisfy savings desires.

So, print money until the economy begs for mercy. MMT also says that the government should run "a budget deficit large enough to achieve full employment through a job guarantee." using "non-accelerating inflation buffer employment ratio (NAIBER)" rather than "non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU)," which I take to be the conventional Keynesian option.  In other words, politicians should do what comes naturally without limit.

Stage Eight: Schachtian Economics. Hjalmar Schacht was the guy that ended the hyperinflation in Germany after World War I. He simply stopped printing unlimited paper money.

Here's what I think.

I think that going back to the dawn of time, governments are always cocking-up the economy with their wars or their loot-and-plunder economic policies. And it's worse than it used to be. Back in Stage One it was really hard for the king to loot the place to pay for his wars. Stage Three: Dutch Finance made war-making much easier, but didn't have a real simple theory for dealing with the financial crashes that occurred from time to time, especially after wars when the government attempted to return to the gold standard at the pre-war parity.

Also, I think that as governments have fine-tuned and learned more and more how to use money printing and debt to loot the country that they have had to let the financial system in on the action. So now we have highly leveraged private-equity funds that the government permits, probably because the finance sector is willing to pay powerful people for the privilege of doing highly-leveraged finance.

My guess is that almost all government spending amounts to loot and plunder and is a net loss to the prosperity and the well-being of the people. So, with government spending at 40 percent of GDP in the US and 50 percent of GDP in the UK you can see that there is a lot of looting and plundering going on, and it subtracts from the possible prosperity that might obtain if the government weren't collecting so much of peoples' incomes and handing it out to its supporters.

And, I would say, as government collects and spends more and more money, it needs new theories to justify its looting and plundering and to get it out of a jam when its cock-ups wreck the economy.

The interesting thing to me is that even lickle AOC knows all about MMT. Like in The Manchurian Candidate, your average politician needs it to be "real simple."

But we wouldn't need all these dodges and cunning tricks to pay for wars and entitlements if government would only keep out of wars and away from loot-and-plunder entitlements.

In another world.