"I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can't take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can't stop." - F.A. Hayek 1984

(kinda) A great website to share if you have no idea how to explain the downfall of the US economy.

Edit: Thanks to everyone who provided insight on this website. I’ve had this in my bookmarks for a very long time and was curious how it held up.

  • SimsEnglish
    13•7 months ago

    Blah blah blah, just dimwitted libertarian propaganda. Who da F**k quotes the Capitalist priest Hayek for anything in 2024 !? What a complete and utter idiot doing this site…

    Oh, and someone please remind these dimwitted market fanatic believers that Capitalism, Hayek and all the other fanatics are the CAUSE of our current collapse and 99.99% of all problems we have on any scale…

  • @ArbiterXeroEnglish
    6•7 months ago

    Isn’t this when we switched from the gold standard, meaning that most charts are useless.

    This is half bullshite

    There’s some validity, but…

  • mozz
    5•7 months ago

    I have a theory which I just came by recently which I think makes a lot of sense:

    In the 1968 Democratic convention, a good number of the rank and file of the left wing of the American politics got attacked by the police, beaten, gassed, thrown in jail, sent to the hospital, or otherwise told in direct physical terms that their “allies” within the establishment weren’t their friends. Before 1968, you could explain it away as one corrupt police force or local suburban society being the enemy, but maybe change was possible within the system at some level. After 1968, it was explicit: Not only are we not going to work for your goals, we might try to kill you if you try to work for your goals. Now please support us in the election, please.

    It would be surprising if that led to anything other than a massive collapse in support for Democrats within the approved electoral system. It would be surprising if that led to anything other than a huge upwelling of momentum and success for the explicitly-fascist wing of American politics, that let them finally take action on their awful longstanding goals after they’d spent decade on decade losing ground.

    And look, both of those things are exactly what happened. It took until 2008 until a Democratic president not named Carter held office and did anything even vaguely left-wing – 40 years. The corporate-death project made quite a lot of progress during those unrestrained 36 years.

    I have no idea if the cause and effect worked the way I describe. But it would make sense to me if it did.

  • lemmyreaderEnglish
    3•7 months ago

    When I saw the title WTF Happened In 1971? I thought of January 1st, 1970 the well-known and recurring date in the computer world,(Ken Thompson, UNIX and so on). And I kinda hoped this would be about how the mass production of computers and its use worldwide had introduced the first step of a collapse of planet Earth. But no, looking at the HN comments it appears to be about Nixon, money, economy and the USA.