The year was 1937, in the midst of a global depression that was not solved by the methods tried by powerful states. It was also two years before Europe became enveloped in war. The intellectual consensus was that freedom and democracy were not on the table. They had been discredited and a new class of intellectuals wedded to the idea of state planning had arisen. They had no shortage of opinions, nearly all of them dangerous and wrong.
This month, I wrote about one of the most comprehensive books that came out at the time. It was called “The Planned Society” and included articles from the world’s top thinkers; it even included, among many contributions by prominent New Dealers, chapters by Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin. The 1,000-page tome was supposed to represent the best of the best of what was clearly an early example of the Great Reset.
The world was faced with the problem of monetary reform. The old-fashioned gold standard had already been systematically destroyed during the 1930s, mostly as an outgrowth of pressures caused by fiscal expansions during the Great War and the need to pay off war debts. The question at that time was what to do under the circumstances. Most Western nations had already rejected free trade policies and broken down their monetary systems. There needed to be some replacement.
This is likely why Cassel was included as a contributor. Sadly, though a solid economic liberal, he, like everyone of his generation, flatly ruled out a completely private monetary system as provided by free enterprise. Many decades would pass before any major thinker even considered such an idea. The question was how to fashion a suitable monetary system to get the world safely to the next stage of economic development.
So in this one area, he made a concession to the idea of government planning. He favored fixing exchange rates between countries and rooting them in a common unit, probably backed by gold. This system came to be the consensus among many aging classical liberals at the time, and it was indeed adopted in 1944 as the international dollar-exchange standard with a fixed price for gold.
That system broke down in the late 1960s. It didn’t work because every country maintained its own fiscal and monetary policies, which led to growing imbalances between countries that were unsustainable. It was replaced by a fiat money system that is even worse.
In any case, Cassel in 1937 conceded that some government action was necessary here but spent most of his essay warning very strongly against socialism, fascism, and government planning in general. None of this would achieve what its proponents imagined. It would enshrine a gaggle of intellectuals as masters of us all. They always purport to know more than they do. They can never outsmart the aspirations of people in their daily lives, who are well-positioned to manage themselves just fine.
Planning can cause wreckage. It most certainly is likely to do so, based on the whole modern experience at such attempts, whether pitched in the name of the right or the left. The Russian Revolution taught us that. The Nazi takeover in Germany had already created disaster by that time.
By 1937, it likely seemed as if war and worsening attempts at planning were baked into the narrative. This reduced the handfuls of remaining classical liberals to pleading with the world community to stop the madness. Here is Cassel’s plea:
“Economic dictatorship is much more dangerous than people believe. Once authoritative control has been established it will not always be possible to limit it to the economic domain. If we allow economic freedom and self-reliance to be destroyed, the powers standing for Liberty will have lost so much in strength that they will not be able to offer any effective resistance against a progressive extension of such destruction to constitutional and public life generally. And if this resistance is gradually given up—perhaps without people ever realizing what is actually going on—such fundamental values as personal liberty, freedom of thought and speech, and independence of science are exposed to imminent danger. What stands to be lost is nothing less than the whole of that civilization that we have inherited from generations which once fought hard to lay its foundations and even gave their life for it. What they have accomplished and handed down to us is a precious inheritance, placing upon the present generation the commanding responsibility of maintaining such treasures intact for the benefit of future generations. This historical responsibility falls with its heaviest weight on those nations that have done most for the development of freedom and for the life and prosperity of which individual liberty has played the most dominant part. Among those nations I should first of all mention the British and the Swedish, and when I, as a Swede, have the great privilege of addressing a distinguished British audience I think it is very much to the point that I finish this address by strongly emphasizing our common responsibility for the conservation of the highest treasures of humanity.”
Wow. I hope you caught his warning about the “imminent danger” to “personal liberty, freedom of thought and speech, and independence of science.”
That was true then and very much true today in our own times of incredible post-pandemic disaster. The response was the biggest global government planning attempt in world history. It was universal. The rules were the same everywhere: human separation, masking, hunkering down, and treating everyone as a disease vector. How well did it work? Everyone got the bug anyway, and economies and whole societies were completely wrecked.
What other evidence do we need? Finally, it was the obvious failure of the vaccine—generic fixes were taken off the shelf in many nations—that finally tipped it over. The elites have only now started admitting error.
The AstraZeneca shot is now being withdrawn from the market entirely. It will take even more outcry to get the rotten mRNA shots off the market, even though they have been proven to be even less effective and more damaging. Very likely, the whole technological experiment of mRNA will end up being shelved, if we have any sense remaining.
The meltdown of the elite planners has come just as quickly as they had implemented their plans. Unfortunately for the rest of us, it will take generations to recover. And that only happens if we don’t lose every shred of civilization between now and then. Clearly, humanity needs better course correction mechanisms in place. The tendency for the egregiously wrong to hold onto their power is too much a fixed part of the operations of the world.
Cassel was a lone voice, but he was entirely correct. So, too, you should be a voice for truth, even if you feel alone in your circles. Cassel spoke out when it mattered most. So should we all, if we want liberty to survive this debacle.
