National Self-Sufficiency (1933) (mtholyoke.edu)

The lowest common denominator in all of this, then and today, are the people we vote into office.

Local elections about 20% turnout.

Presidential about 50%?

The movie Idiocracy doesn't seem like satire anymore.

A very interesting read. Propaganda seems to be constructed similarly using the communication tools of the day. The patterns are very similar.

Everyone but the most callous of businessthralls has felt, at times, the same reaction as Keynes elicits here, against the ugliness of a world turned by free trade and markets. Such arrangements of human desire (what else is a market?) do occasionally produce greatness and the sublime, but only with the mediation of a culture prior-to and underdetermined-by themselves, and amounting to nothing compared with the feelings of greatness and sublime that nation-states have proven capable of achieving: for example, the most ineconomic Apollo 11.