"Everything you read, when he came in [to power] he was good...They built tremendous highways and got all the factories going...Everybody knows he was good at the beginning but he just went too far."-- Marge Schott on Hitler, ESPN 1996
Major league baseball forced her to sell her franchise at a considerable discount for those comments. Had she only lived long enough to be alive today to read the New York Times...
Stimulus Thinking, and Nuance
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: March 31, 2009
In the summer of 1933, just as they will do on Thursday, heads of government and their finance ministers met in London to talk about a global economic crisis. They accomplished little and went home to battle the crisis in their own ways.
More than any other country, Germany — Nazi Germany — then set out on a serious stimulus program. The government built up the military, expanded the autobahn, put up stadiums for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and built monuments to the Nazi Party across Munich and Berlin.
The economic benefits of this vast works program never flowed to most workers, because fascism doesn’t look kindly on collective bargaining. But Germany did escape the Great Depression faster than other countries. Corporate profits boomed, and unemployment sank (and not because of slave labor, which didn’t become widespread until later). Harold James, an economic historian, says that the young liberal economists studying under John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s began to debate whether Hitler had solved unemployment.
I believe that David Leonhardt and the New York Times have just vindicated Marge Schott. Schott was an old woman not too far from death, her best days behind her. I guess you could say the same about the New York Times.
I didn't like the way National Socialism worked in Germany. I am not dying to try an American variety. Sphere: Related Content
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