home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU
- Path: sparky!uunet!paladin.american.edu!auvm!CLEMSON.BITNET!DGPAZ
- Message-ID: <HISTORY%92091109104839@RUTVM1.BITNET>
- Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
- Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1992 09:10:00 EDT
- Sender: History <HISTORY@RUTVM1.BITNET>
- From: DGPAZ@CLEMSON.BITNET
- Subject: re: Clinton Administration?
- Lines: 38
-
- On Fri, 11 Sep 1992 14:36:32 +1000 Marion Diamond
- <med@LINGUA.CLTR.UQ.OZ.AU> said:
-
- > Denis,
- > George Bush's promise of subsidies to wheat producers in America
- > don't look like the Manchester School at work from here (a wheat-
- > growing competitor which doesn't subsidise grain).
-
- You are correct. One also might add Bush's policy of lots of
- lolly for the victims of Hurricane Andrew. A good mancunian
- economist I suppose would let them rot and wait for the invisible
- hand to do its work. Like the Potato Famine.
- How about this?
- George Bush is a believer in the Manchester School of
- economics, but he also believes in buying votes.
-
- > On a related issue, has it ever struck anyone that there is a
- > fascinating parallel between the Japanese determinatio to protect
- > its rice producers, and the 19C Corn Laws? Both were based partly
- > on the need to protect conservative rural electors, both were
- > continued long after their respective countries had become far too
- > powerful economically to need such protection, both increase/d the
- > costs of labour for the manufacturers (and artificially reduced the
- > supply of land for housing), and both were/are based partly on
- > a perceived fear of starvation which has continued for 40+ years since
- > their involvement in global war, and partly on a quasi-religious
- > identification with this particular grain as the staff of life,
- > which should not be surrendered to foreign producers.
-
- Very interesting parallels--I don't think that the Victorians had
- quite the same quasi-religious view of corn as the Japanese apparently
- do of rice--although of course corn becomes bread which then becomes
- the body of christ -- but most supporters of the corn laws, the
- ultra-tories, also believed in the Protestant Constitution and
- rejected with contempt the doctrine of the real presence.
-
- Denis Paz
- dgpaz@clemson.bitnet
-