The 2026 World’s Fair of Money

For the first time since 2019, I attended the annual summer convention of the American Numismatic Association, branded as The World’s Fair of Money®. (The late winter convention is the National Money Show®.) This year the WFM was held in Pittsburgh. Having been away from the hobby for several years, I went only to renew or discover  friendships and I did not deliver a presentation though I judged Literature exhibits. The Literature category had three entrants: The Works of David R. Sear, Selected Banknote Reporters, and Selected Works of Charles Trissler Steigerwalt.

I attended the judges orientation on Tuesday and started rating the exhibits that afternoon. With me was my host in Pittsburgh, a lifelong printer and typesetter. We read the exhibits and talked about them that afternoon and into the evening. When I returned to the convention Wednesday morning, I reviewed my work. In my opinion, all of the Literature exhibits had problems that prevented any of them from a clear first place award. 

First place went to The Works of David R. Sear. The ten display cases held nice, newish copies of the editions of his books. All of the books were closed. Not presented were page proofs, mark-ups, or manuscripts. Nothing was said about content added or deleted across editions. The need to change prices was mentioned but without explanations of cause, only a tautologous statement that rising prices caused prices to change necessitating a new edition.

Historian Dennis Boggs
www.meetmrlincoln.com

Cards around the volumes carried lines and paragraphs about Sear and how he became the leading author of these catalog price guides for Greek, Roman, and Byzantine coins. In my opinion, the best thing about the exhibit was the typesetting on the note cards which were mounted on foam-core panels. 

After I turned in my judging forms, I was free to explore the convention and meet people. With my reporter’s notebook in hand, I introduced myself with my business card, saying that I would be writing about the convention for both online and print media. 

Near the center of the floor, opposite the U.S. Mint, the four representatives of Goldback did not go on record or talk to me and insisted that only the CEO or publicity manager was authorized to speak for the company and no one went on record because they were unauthorized to say that their pricing information is proprietary and not for public release. However, Goldback issued demonstration notes for the convention and those were giveaways on the floor. 

Some of the recent issues of T&S Coins of Vilnius.

T&S Coin of Vilnius was also on the Promenade at booth 1033.  Their representative, Julija Markauskienė, sat down with me to outline their business model and marketing. T&S Coin (https://www.ts-coin.com) specializes in high-relief silver celebrations, limited to 500 pieces per design. The newest products are 2-ounce coins. Many series are colorized. The premium product is sold wholesale to dealers who have pre-positioned customers for these memorials to pirates, samurai, Amazons, elves, the Knights Templar, and very many other popular themes. Coins denominated in dollars have been issued for Liberia and Niue. For Cameroun, the denominations have been in francs. 

Julija Markauskienė greets a customer.

Julija Markauskienė told me that their issues are usually 95% sold out when released. As a result, she said, there is an active secondary market. She told me that their sales break out into roughly one-third each in Europe, Asia, and North America.  

Vintage Collectibles Group (Florida) and Omaha Collectibles Group (Nebraska) are the banners for Matthew Brotherton of Knoxville, Tennessee. A graduate of the University of Tennessee College of Law, Matt came to numismatics because his father was a collector. He told me that he loves history and loves to travel. 

It was nice to stop by and chat with Jonathan K. Kern of Lexington, Kentucky. Long ago, he helped me acquire an ancient Greek coin for my collection, “Towns and Times of Philosophers.” Our children are about the same age. In addition to ancients, Kern works with US federal and related coinage, and he is a PCGS-authorized dealer for direct grading submittals. 

My introduction to numismatics came from Liberty Coin Service of Lansing, Michigan. Back in 1972, the owner, Bill Bradford, and I sat on a curb outside the East Lansing State Bank where he had a box. A few weeks later, he had a counter in a jewelry store. The next year he had the whole store. Ten years later, an admirer of H. L. Mencken’s The American Mercury, he retired from numismatics to start Liberty magazine, selling the store to Pat Heller. Nominally, Pat retired a few years ago, but he was at the show. I met him at the Exhibits on  Tuesday afternoon, and he was at the LCS booth the next day. 

Tyrants of the Golden Horn is a museum experience. The traveling exhibit is called the world’s most valuable private collection. It embraces “tyrants” from the Tigris to the Thames by displaying the highest quality examples of their most valuable circulating coins, such as the gold solidus of Constantinople. From the first Roman coins struck there to the first modern issues of Turkey, they say that their hallways offer a complete inventory of rulers. Find their website at https://www.thetyrantcollection.com/the-collection/

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Numismatic Truthseekers 

I Took My Change in Baybucks 

Numismatics: The Standard of Proof in Economics 

The Future of Money 

Numismatics: History as Market 

Five Books about Books

In the Library of Congress catalog system, books about books are under Z: Bibliography, Library Science, and General Information Resources. That large umbrella covers the history of books and therefore typesetting and the craft of making the media of writing and reading.

Notes from a Public Typewriter edited by Michael Gustafson and Oliver Uberti. Grand Central Publishing (Hachette Book Group), 2018. (UT Library Z 49 N68 2018 MAIN)

Michael and Hilary Gustafson own the Literati bookstore in Ann Arbor. Shortly after they opened in 2013, they provided their customers with a mechanical typewriter for leaving thoughts or often only words, alone or in a string. 

Google Maps view.
124 East Washington Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

At first, the machine was only a display. The impetus for active use came from the first customer who asked for paper. Makes and models changed. I found the logos for Rheinmetall, Royal, and Olympia; they probably had others. One note asked, “Where is the power button?” 

Whimsical or deep, fleeting or deserving of stone, the random writings of these literati provided Laurel and me occasional minutes away from work, sitting on the living room couch. For myself, given the social context of a typewriter in a bookstore on the main street of a university town, the marriage proposals (and rejections) gave me the most to consider.

500 Years of Printing  by Frederick G. Melcher, et al. American Institute of Graphic Arts, 1940; 31 pages (6-³/₁₆ x 9-⅛). (UT Library Z 127 C5 P9 LIB SCH)

Towns across America and around the world celebrated the 500th anniversary of Gutenberg’s press. This book acknowledged the war that America was not yet formally engaged in: 

“It will often be said, especially in this year of international turmoil, that printing, like all inventions, has great power for evil as well as for good, that false ideas can be as successfully disseminated as sound ones, that disrupting propaganda can be readily put in print as constructive programs, that oppressors can as easily use the press as liberators. This has been true in all of the five centuries since printing began, yet the gains have far outweighed the harm and will continue to do so. Literacy has been extended, libraries established for the free use of books, book ownership has been made more universal and the machinery of book distribution has been bettered.” 

The eight essays deliver richly detailed history about publishing in our America. However, the first three set a foundation with the fifteenth century and Gutenberg before revealing the surviving works of the printing press in Mexico 1539. In the British colonies of North America, newspapers were preferred. After independence many more books were produced; as a consequence of both, machines evolved rapidly.

Books & Readers in Ancient Greece & Rome by Frederick G. Kenyon. Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1932. (Z 112 K38 1932 MAIN). Kenyon was the Director and Principal Librarian of the British Museum. This book draws on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (from c. BCE 100 to CE 200), and other finds discovered only the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One trove came from a home in Herculaneum (79 CE). Much here is from inferences for which the earlier empirical evidence quickly becomes scanty. We know more from allusions to books in books than to actual copies. A nice touch here (and admittedly a problem) is that the quotations in Latin and Greek are not translated. 

In our common culture, proclamations on scrolls are read 

from top to bottom. In fact, a typical papyrus scroll was held 

horizontally fed from the right and unrolled to the left, two 

columns on a page (reading left to right), two pages to a sheet, 

each line about 20 characters. 

This book was intended for an American audience. All high schools taught Latin and many offered Greek. For myself, it was possible to glean a lot from cognates in Latin, though fewer popped up in Greek. I was surprised at how well I could sound out the Greek miniscules. I seem to have learned my letters over the years.

Heidi Kasa reading from
The Beginners at 
Anna's Antiques.

I had to pause at Kenyon’s prejudices. We each have our own. About the library room unearthed at a home in Herculaneum, Kenyon gives reasons for suspecting that the owner was Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher. “It is only to be regretted that the owner was not a collector of works of poetry or history, instead of a philosopher.” 

Kenyon also dislikes public performances. Authors recited in public spaces and they also rented private homes for the purpose. “It was not a healthy phase for literature, since it encouraged compositions which lent themselves to rhetorical declamation; and one may doubt whether it did any service to the circulation of books.” 

As the curator of an endowed institution, Kenyon had no feel for the paths by which words find paper and together they find readers. 

Hungarian Pioneers of Printing Arts: Mechanization of Setting by Dr. Peter Szöke. Hungarian Central Technical Library and Documentation Center, 1972. (UT Library Z 134 H9 V351 LIB SCH). Although culturally an island, Hungary benefited from the industrial revolution and independent inventors patented their solutions to the problems of typesetting. The machines here are similar to others that are known.

Literary Machines by Theodor Holm Nelson.Project Xanadu. 1980 - 1987.  (UT Library Z 52.4 N46 1987B C.2 MAIN). Ted Nelson was an early advocate and promoter of small computers. Literary Machines continued and extended the ideas presented in his oversize coffee table essay Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974) which advocated for the popularization and democratization of computers via microcomputers (and terminals to mainframes). The extensively unstructured delivery of Literary Machines focused (for lack of a better word) on hypertext. Nelson called it that back in 1965. Today, we expect to be able to link information: data and metadata; Github and Get Info. 

• Computer Lib/Dream Machine is available on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/computer-lib-dream-machines and 
• Literary Machines is readable here: https://archive.org/details/lm-81/LM81
• The full Ted Nelson Archive is also open for access https://archive.org/details/tednelsonarchive

Previously on Necessary Facts

Goudy by Bernard Lewis and Goudy in His Own Words. 

Frederic W. Goudy by Peter Beilenson 

Hermann Zapf on Alphabets 

Start the Presses 

For the Glory of Old Lincoln High 

Psychohistory from Asimov’s Foundation to Big Data

Psychohistory had no academic definition before Isaac Asimov penned his Foundation Trilogy 1942-1953. In the 1970s the academic pursuit of psychohistory began as the application of psychoanalysis (Freud) to explain of the events of history. Alternate meaning came from attempting to explain individual psychology in terms of historical context. Eventually, in our time of big data and artificial intelligence, Asimov’s intention of a mathematical treatment of large scale historical events is a real though still putative pursuit. It is an easy claim (1 below) that no doctoral research program in history includes “psychohistory” in the title. 

Nevertheless, Asimov's intention has been understood. See for example, "Towards Asimov's Psychohistory: Harnessing Topological Data Analysis, Artificial Intelligence and Social Media Data to Forecast Societal Trends" by Isabela Rocha, Institute of Political Science of the University of Brasilia. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03446 and as edited arXiv:2407.03446v1 ) Rocha wrote: "In the age of big data and advanced computational methods, the prediction of large-scale social behaviors, reminiscent of Isaac Asimov's fictional science of Psychohistory, is becoming increasingly feasible." 

In addition, biologist and systems researcher Salva Duran-Nebreda also found Asimov's suggestion compelling: "Recent advances in complex systems research, computer-based simulations, and large-scale databases, are paving the way towards fully developing a mathematical theory of human history." ("Rashevsky’s dream: A physico-mathematical foundation of history and culture," Metode Science Studies Journal, Issue 13.)

Before the Renaissance, the depiction of a better world was always a previous golden age. This is in the Old Testament and it is in Hesiod’s Works and Days. Only with the Renaissance did there come a new idea: that we could create a better society. At root, the idea was a resurrection of Plato’s Republic but it soon became more than that because different philosophers had other ideas of what constituted a good society. Moreover, a causal vector in the rise of capitalism came from predictive mathematics. The exploration of gambling outcomes by Fermat and Pascal led quickly to the monetization and fungibility of risk. The statistical likelihood of future events was predictable — and therefore (theoretically) controllable. 

Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy was a child of its own time. Personal criticism of Asimov comes from his actions toward women at science fiction conventions and other gatherings. He, too, was a child of his time. First, science fiction of the Golden Age was a medium for boys. Girls were interested in science, of course, and political leaders with foresight encouraged an influx of young women into university science classes. (See “The Legacy of Vannevar Bush (Part 3)” published here June 1, 2025.) The primary actors in the Foundation Trilogy are men. Deeper than that, in  Foundation and Empire (1952; originally, book two in the series) when Bayta Darrell attempts to outline her analysis of Foundation politics to her husband, his father, and uncle, Toran Darrell leans over and  puts his hand over her mouth.

The Industrial Revolution was the cultural shift that created and allowed science fiction itself as apart from fable. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells were preceded by John Leonard Riddell, inventor of the binocular microscope, professor of chemistry, working geologist and botanist, and author and publisher of Orrin Lindsay’s Plan of Aerial Navigation, with a Narrative of His Explorations in the Higher Regions of the Atmosphere, and His Wonderful Voyage Round the Moon! (Rea's Power Press, New Orleans, 1847) (Cited on NecessaryFacts here.) Orrin Lindsay and his companion, an instrument maker, are both men, of course. A hundred years later, the world was changing. Many women science fiction authors hid their sex with pseudonyms, but others did not. 

Of course, previous science fiction placed its conflicts in worlds with troubles: no troubles; no story. Nonetheless, foundational to that was a general optimism that the future would evolve and be ever-better. H. G. Wells warned twice that the coming World War Two would bring an end to civilization. But it was ultimately only a temporary pause. He knew that some people would follow a would-be tyrant and rally against a rocket into outer space, but into the cosmos do go the rocket and the young couple. 

Two years ago (almost to date), I was having my stem cells harvested and ahead of that to pass the time while the tubes were in, I bought an armload of science fiction books at ArmadilloCon 45. Ecological disaster is the new normal. And unlike the science fiction of the Golden Age solving the problem does not create a better world—because the problem does not get solved. They just all go down the drain together. 

Hari Seldon was right: the intellectual leaders of our empire of science fiction cannot imagine a world other than the one they know. To even label the years 1941 to 1965, the “Golden Age of science fiction” is to admit the poverty of the present. And yet, I was, indeed, having my stem cells harvested.

Contrary to that Asimov’s own creation of the word “psychohistory” launched the academic studies that also use that name. 

The Journal of Psychohistory has been publishing quarterly since 1973, originally as The History of Childhood Quarterly and since 1976 as The Journal of Psychohistory. It is somewhat unique in the world of academic publishing in being one of very few journals not published by a large publishing house or by a University Press, subsidized by university funds. It has been independently published by Lloyd deMause for more than 40 years.

    The JOP has been a place where many authors have been able to see their work published in more than 800 articles, as well a several hundred book reviews and review essays. We welcome contributions to a new section that will run from time to time, Psychohistorical Perspective on Current Events.

    Recent issues include articles such as: A “Backward Engineering” view into how atrocities can be performed mechanistically and without feeling or guilt, how Politics Can Be Seen as Reflecting Borderline Polarization, The Spanish and Portuquese Inquisition’s methods to uncover hidden beliefs and motivations, The Tea Party and the Recent Rise of Right-Wing racism, Mass Incarceration and American Racism, Slavery’s Transgenerational Impact on Southern Personality, and the Unconscious Wishes behind Nuclear Armaments and Wars. -- The Journal of Psychohistory https://psychohistory.com/the-journal-of-psychohistory/

I identify that as postmodernist with the attendant problems inherent in the academic culture of anti-capitalism, anti-individualism, anti-reason. They dominate, but they do not control. Here at the University of Texas, I have my quibbles with the Salem Institute and the other fans of Ayn Rand at the McCombs School of Business but here they are, doing their best to keep the syllogisms and money flowing. 

Psychohistory

Psychohistory uses psychoanalytical theory and sociological research methods to examine the psychological origins and motivations for the social and political behavior of significant individuals, groups, and nations, both past and present, as well as psychological aspects of historical and current events. The goal of psychohistory is to understand the causes of human destructiveness and benevolence.

Psychohistory attempts to understand how historical and current events are shaped by individual and group psychologies, as well as how the past and the present influence the psychologies of individuals and groups. 

Early influential works of psychohistory include Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom (1941), which examined psychological motivations behind political ideologies. Eric Erikson's biography of Martin Luther, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958), was one of the first psychobiographies of a famous historical figure, and many contemporary biographies now include aspects of psychobiography. Lloyd deMause (1931–2020) is widely viewed as the founder of psychohistory as a formal academic discipline, beginning in the 1970s. Psychohistory, however, remains controversial, and many traditional historians are reluctant to attribute major human events to the psychology of individuals or groups. -- “Psychohistory,” in The Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology, Editor Jacqueline L. Longe, Vol. 2. 4^th ed.

See also:

• (1) "The Dilemmas of Psychohistory," Fuchsman, Ken. The Journal of Psychohistory (Vol 47. Number 3, Winter 2020). 
• "Remembering the future: science and positivism from Isaac Asimov to Gregory Benford,"Extrapolation (Vol. 39, Issue 2), Kent State University Press.
• "The Origins of Inspiration: Winwood Reade's role in the foundation of Isaac Asimov's psychohistory," LaBounty, David. Extrapolation (Vol. 39. Issue 4), Kent State University Press.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(novel_series)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data
• https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Foundation_series
• https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Seldon_Crisis
• "The Computational Power of a Human Society: a New Model of Social Evolution," Wolpert, David; Harper, Kyle. Cliodynamics, 2025-05, Vol.16 (1)

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

ArmadilloCon versus Artificial Intelligence 

The Remarkable Story of Risk 

Knowledge Maps

Visualizing Complex Data 

A Chronology of Recent Historical Periods  

Karl Marx and the Dustbin of History 

When Did the Great Depression Begin? 

Contemporary Reports: Panics or Puffery? 

Tragedy and Farce: Dealing with President Donald Trump

In 2005, we gathered up all of our college credits and enrolled to complete our baccalaureate degrees. It is no surprise that academia is politically progressive and bringing with me a more open mind I learned a lot mostly about paying attention to questions. What is an art? What is a science? What is proof? What is evidence? What is a theory? 

I read The Art of the Deal soon after it was published, courtesy of my local branch library in Lansing, Michigan, and I was impressed: you can always make something attractive to someone else. Over the years, perceptual check marks tagged the news about Donald Trump’s real estate projects and then his television shows, but he was always only somewhere between Lee Iacocca and Madonna. Then he got serious.

 

Donald Trump was always a Democrat because of his involvements in real estate with planning & zoning commissions and labor unions. So, when he ran for the Presidency, it was clear to me from Day One that his concern was only for the best of all possible marketing. 

In my estimation, he did not want to face Hillary Clinton in the primaries where he could be beaten and discarded early on. Instead, he chose the Republican party because he knew that he could take out the lightweights such as Ron Paul, Ted Cruz, and Carli Fiorina. Even if he lost to Clinton in the general election, he still would have run as a major party candidate and earned a place in history. He was greatly helped in 2016 by Robert Mercer who brought him Steve Bannon. (See "Jim Simons and the Quants" on NecessaryFacts.) Bannon convinced Trump to broadcast a narrative that would resonate with the untapped reservoir of available voters. 

 

Just ahead of the 2016 general election, Michael Moore
warned Democrats (and others) why Donald Trump
would be elected.

Just ahead of the 2016 election, Michael Moore spoke to several groups, warning them of how and why Donald Trump was going to win by tapping into the unvoiced angst of the masses. 

"Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of Ford Motor executives and said, 'If you close these factories as you're planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico, I'm going to put a 35 percent tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody's going to buy them'," said Moore.

It is the art of the deal, a mass mediated hyper-reality in which the broadcaster Donald Trump played to the people what they told him that they wanted to hear. 

Donald Trump treated Marine Corps General James N. Mattis as if Mattis were an Apprentice. And Mattis was not the only one to be summarily fired. Nonetheless, on the second and now third time around, Trump still had the support of people who never thought that he would betray them. Of course, you can only betray your friends because your enemies already do not trust you. Trump had the support of anti-communist Venezuelans in Miami. Having lived here since fleeing Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro, they had businesses and homes. And then came the revocation of protections against deportation. Just ahead of the 2024 election, Donald Trump stood on a stage in Detroit with leaders of the Arab community, and they believed that he agreed with them. 

 

Those of us who advocate for laissez-faire capitalism easily point to the fact that successful marketing impels toward a common benevolent morality because you have to get along with other people. But there are businesses that succeed “one customer at a time” because there is always a (new) sucker born every minute. 

 

And then there is the “long con,” the somewhat complicated confidence game, portrayed in the 1973 movie, The Sting. In any negotiation, the Art of the Deal can involve offering terms that you do not mind abandoning as the cost of gaining the next and more important advantage. Donald Trump’s wavering and waffling upsets traditionalist markets because uncertainty is uncomfortable to most people. 

"An entrepreneur is born with the mentality to take risks, though there are several important characteristics: courage, faith in yourself, and above all, even when you fail, to learn from failure and get up and try again."  - Sheldon Adelson, 2013

Scientists and entrepreneurs live with the unknown and therefore with uncertainty. Einstein was married three times and retracted what he called his biggest mistake twice because he was wrong about being wrong. Get over it and move on. Donald Trump is willing to abandon a resource or a plan and try something new, something else. It is the very definition of pragmatism, a distinctly American philosophy. 

He has filed four bankruptcies. As the insurance magnate, Thomas Caldecot Chubb said, when his clerks were panicked because a ship had gone down with an insured cargo, “If there were no losses, there would be no premiums.” Investors sometimes suffer losses and at the level of  The Trump Organization  all investors practice their own due diligence. So, Donald Trump accepts the losses—2200 points on the Dow Jones for Friday, April 5, 2025—but what are the premiums that he expects? President Trump assures us that in the long run, this all will be good for America. 

• Some goods will not be subject to the Reciprocal Tariff. These include: (1) articles subject to 50 USC 1702(b); (2) steel/aluminum articles and autos/auto parts already subject to Section 232 tariffs; (3) copper, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and lumber articles; (4) all articles that may become subject to future Section 232 tariffs; (5) bullion; and (6) energy and other certain minerals that are not available in the United States. 
• “Made in America” is not just a tagline—it’s an economic and national security priority of this Administration. The President’s reciprocal trade agenda means better-paying American jobs making beautiful American-made cars, appliances, and other goods.
• These tariffs seek to address the injustices of global trade, re-shore manufacturing, and drive economic growth for the American people.-- White House Fact Sheet for April 2, 2025.

 

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than
2200 points before settling for a 1600-point tumble

The economy is the active total of trillions of individual choices. Perhaps no stochastic theory is sufficient to predict the next fashion craze but it is possible to analyze the past, to explain it, and to test that theory against other (different) facts, especially when those are submitted as predictions to allow falsification of the theory.

 

The rubrics of the early 20^th century—broad socialisms and fascisms, anti-democratic coups and attempted coups, the contraction of international trade, the Great Depression, and ultimately, World War II and the Cold War—were not isolated events, unrelated to each other, causeless or chaotic and complicated beyond comprehension. 

 

The Roman senate continued to vote on consuls who really were emperors as the coinage was debased, plagues swept the population centers, earthquakes proved impossible to rebuild from, foreign hordes invaded the outer districts and then Italy. Decline and retreat affected the philosophers at Athens, the scholars at Alexandria, the jurists at Rhodes. In those days, all of that took lifetimes over generations, and each day seemed very much like the previous day. We understand it now by compressing the retrospective.

 

In high school history, I learned that the real “American revolution” took place in the minds of people between 1756 and 1775, when the leading thinkers and writers expressed the understanding that the Bill of Rights of 1689 would never be allowed to them. The events after the July 1776 were the War for Independence. 

The failed Continental dollar and the ephemeral money issued by new States (in paper and copper) presaged the Alien and Sedition Acts. In France, the same kinds of events ultimately brought regicide, the Directorate, the failed assignat paper money, and then Napoleon Bonaparte, initially as First Consul, and inevitably as the Emperor. Again, though, it took 20 years and through each of those 7000 days, people lived their own lives as best they could under the circumstances—which is always true.

 

Now we communicate at the speed of light with images and sounds enhancing and eclipsing words. Centuries, decades, lifetimes, days, hours, all are compacted into minutes and seconds as historical events become daily news and then hourly updates. 

 

It may become history that cash inflows to the government from President Trump’s tariffs, coupled with his drastic cuts to the federal workforces (both salaried and subsidized) will balance the federal budget and reduce the federal deficit while cutting direct taxes, and all of that will allow the general economy to expand and extend. It may be that a later round of deal-making will bring among nations a broad reduction in all tariffs.

 

However, reality cannot be cheated. I believe that the likely outcome will be an economic depression and eruptions of armed conflicts all of which President Trump will declare to be fake news, insisting that prosperity and peace are here and we are enjoying them.

 

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. 

...

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. 

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx. 

Transcription/Markup: Zodiac and Brian Baggins for Marx/Engels Internet Archive 1995, 1999; Proofed: and corrected by Alek Blain, 2006, Mark Harris, 2010. --https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf

 

Pamela Graves was my professor for Modern Europe
at Eastern Michigan University. She taught me that history
is a science and we write it in the past tense.

 

Previously on NecessaryFacts

Tycoon Dough is Democratic 

When Did the “Great Depression” Begin? 

Venture Capital 

Capitalist Culture

The Remarkable Story of Risk 

The Cure for a Failing Empire