160 Years Since the Second Battle of Manassas

Today marks 160 years since the second battle of Manassas on August 28, 1862, at 6 p.m. It is a beautiful sunny day, with fields of green, wildflowers, butterflies, and fragrant hay being harvested by nearby farmers on a hot and humid 90-degree F summer day.

Nearly as many lives were lost in the Civil War (April 12, 1861-May 9, 1865) as there were lost in all other wars combined, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam War. The tally of the dead in the Civil War was 622,000; all other wars, 638,000 soldiers have lost their lives.

The first battle of Manassas took place on July 21, 1861, on these pastures adjacent to farms, teeming with fauna and flora. Butterflies surrounded us as we walked through paths surrounded by wildflowers or through freshly mowed parcels.

Brothers fought against brothers across the fertile agricultural fields and in the woods nearby. Their blood soaked the fragrant ground. One of the casualties was Captain James B. Ricketts of Company I, First U.S. Artillery. He was shot in the thigh while commanding his battery, captured by the Confederates, and recuperated at the nearby Portici plantation before his imprisonment in Richmond.

The soldiers who survived the Civil War erected the Bull Run monument on Henry Hill which took three weeks to build and was finished and dedicated on June 11, 1865. It is one of the oldest extant monuments on any Civil War battlefield. The soldiers also honored those who fell in the Second Battle of Manassas and built a similar monument near the Deep Cut.

According to park archives, one of the nearby farms, Spring Hill farm, now simply known as Henry Hill, was overgrown and abandoned in the summer of 1861 because its owner was 84-year-old Judith Henry. She had a small vegetable garden and orchard around the old frame house.  She was bedridden, too old to work the land owned by her family for over a century. Her daughter Ellen lived with her and with a hired teenage slave, Lucy Griffith, who helped with domestic chores.

Sadly, the First Battle of Manassas (Bull Run, named after the nearby creek) descended on her property. Federal artillery fired on Confederate sharpshooters, unaware that civilians were inside the home. Cannon fire hit the house and mortally wounded the elderly widow, the only known civilian casualty. At the end of that fateful day, July 21, 1861, the matriarch was dead, and her house ruined. By March 1862 there was very little left standing from the Henry House.

The 7th Georgia Infantry lost its leader, Colonel Francis S. Bartow, killed at First Manassas; he was a Georgia politician who defended slavery and states’ rights. According to the Manassas National Battlefield Park, Bartow “was rendered one of the South’s earliest military martyrs.” His original monument, a stone shaft erected where he fell, disappeared and the current marker dates to 1936.

A white monument is dedicated to General Bernard Elliott Bee of South Carolina, commander of the 3^rd Brigade Army of the Shenandoah who was also killed on July 21, 1861. He is said to have rallied his scattered troops by giving the command, “Form, form, there stands Jackson like a stone wall, rally behind the Virginians.”

The three-day battle of Second Manassas began on August 28, 1862, as a twilight battle near the Brawner farm. Brigadier General Rufus King’s division was looking for the “elusive” Stonewall” Jackson in the direction of Centreville. Jackson was behind the Union line with half of the Confederate Army. As Gen. King’s columns passed the village of Groveton, the Confederate artillery emerged from the woods and surprised the Federals. Union troops responded and a fierce battle ensued.

Archeological digs at the Brawner Farm unearthed thousands of artifacts about those who lived and fought in this now quiet corner of the Manassas Battlefield. Artifacts from the August 1862 three-day battle included dropped bullets, military buttons, and the sabot and base from a 3-inch Dyer artillery shell.

The Brawner Farm sustained so much damage from the battle on August 28, 1862, that the family abandoned the property and the antebellum house that stood on the site.

The area was devastated when, for the second time in thirteen months, war came to the Manassas community. Civilians chose to flee the area in advance of the troop arrivals, but others decided to stay and hid in cellars and outbuildings.

The occupying soldiers confiscated grain, killed livestock, burned fence rails for firewood, and killed chickens for food. Homes were used for field hospitals. Photographs from that time show that the devastation of the area during the Second Battle of Manassas far surpassed the destruction during the First Battle of Manassas.

Ann Strobel wrote in her diary, “All who come down represent Prince William County as a perfectly desolated waste, without food in it for man or beast, and the few houses that are left standing as without occupants.”

The Battle of Second Manassas counted 23,000 casualties, with nearly 3,300 soldiers dead.  Makeshift shallow graves on the battlefield contained soldiers from both armies. They were not buried properly until the end of the Civil War.

The Federal government removed the Union dead to Arlington National Cemetery. The Manassas Ladies’ Memorial Association, founded in 1867, assisted in the interment of 500 Confederate dead in Groveton Cemetery. Only two fallen soldiers were actually identified and have individual headstone. Some soldiers may still remain buried in unmarked graves on the battlefield.

On August 30, 1862, the 5^th New York Volunteer Infantry, called “Duryee’s Zouaves,” sustained the heaviest loss, devastated by the massive Confederate counterattack.  New York volunteers suffered 330 casualties in less than 15 minutes, 120 soldiers killed or mortally wounded. Two wounded members, Charles Brehm and Eugene Geer, hid in the Stone House and carved their names in the wooden floor and baseboard.

Duryee’s Zouaves took their name from Abram Duryee, their first commander, and the “Zouave” style uniform modeled after the French colonial troops of North Africa.

Built around 1825, the Stone House at the intersection of the historical Warrenton Turnpike and Manassas-Sudley Road was a witness to history during the First and Second Manassas. Inside the now restored house, some soldiers, seeking temporary shelter, left their carved marks in the baseboards. The Buck Hill on the right of the Stone House gives a good vantage point to the historic crossroads. During times of peace, the Stone House was a tavern and traveler’s rest.

During the First Battle of Manassas (Bull Run) in July 1861, the Stone House was at the center of fighting and the wounded were brought in for shelter. There were so many wounded at one point that one soldier said, “the rattle of musket balls against the walls of the building was almost incessant.”

During the Second Battle of Manassas in August 1862, Union General John Pope chose Buck Hill by the Stone House as his headquarters. Wounded soldiers filled the Stone House again and two of them who were upstairs, carved their names in the wood. Federal surgeons, under truce, tended to the wounded here. Confederate soldiers used the Stone House as a parole station for prisoners of war.

Further down the road, the Stone Bridge became the scene of the opening shots of the First Battle of Manassas and the retreat of the Federals from the Second Battle of Manassas. The reconstructed Stone Bridge over Bull Run creek is historically accurate.

So much history in this part of Virginia is seldom visited by Americans who avoid their history, good or bad, and events that shaped their country. Perhaps it is because Virginia’s population is changing rapidly, with Democrat socialists in power, and new arrivals from other countries who do not really care about America’s history, its past, or the significance of the places they inhabit now. They do not realize how much sacrifice has been made and how much blood has been spilled in these two battles alone so that a strong union could be forged. For better or worse, it has shaped the country into what it is today, including the benefits they derive from living here.

Note: Color photos credit - Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh, August 28, 2022

          Black and white photo - Manassas park archives

Shortage of Teachers

The teacher shortage across the nation is getting more critical, following two years of an extended and mishandled pandemic which affected education in public schools significantly. Unions have made unreasonable demands for their teachers who did not want to teach in a classroom due to an irrational fear of death from a virus.

Some teachers quit because they refused to teach the divisive and racist critical race theory (CRT). Other teachers refused to be vaccinated against Covid-19. Students older than 12 were also forced to vaccinate against the highly ineffective Covid-19 injection to attend school and other school-related activities.

The teacher shortage is exacerbated by the license required by each state’s Department of Education in order to teach in public schools, even for seasoned teachers with a Ph.D. in a non-College of Education degree and a lot of years of experience teaching in higher education – they must have the approval of the vaunted Department of Education or else they are not qualified to teach.

Knowledge and content of a particular subject are not as important as a license. Due to the teacher shortage, licensed teachers are now teaching subjects they know nothing about.

The license, a piece of paper issued by each state, guarantees that the prospective teacher is good at making adorable and colorful bulletin boards and lesson plans - the paperwork with objectives must be completed, posted, and turned in to the administrators in a timely manner and placed on visible bulletin boards. Whether there is actual teaching and learning of those objectives in the classroom, that is a different story! And the students’ performance on standardized states proves the lack of learning.

The teaching profession has attracted students who had a harder time passing science and mathematics classes in college. Stronger math and science students were not interested in a College of Education degree because they knew that the pay was and still is lower when compared to employment with an Arts and Science degree.

Teaching has never been easy – it takes dedication, long hours, knowledge, and the pay is quite low. The school day never ends for a teacher at 4 p.m. The briefcase is full of papers to grade, lessons to plan, and reading materials to keep up with new developments, good or bad, required by the Department of Education.

I cannot imagine what must take place in most classrooms today! Judging by the woke teachers posting on TikTok, the situation in the elementary classrooms, with the most impressionable students, the teachers are bent on grooming kids into their depraved and delusional lifestyle. People with obvious mental issues oversee vulnerable kids.

Gone are the days when teachers were mostly positive role models, imperfect humans outside of the classroom. They came to class cleanly dressed, men were shaven, cared for their appearance, respected their students, and taught them how to be respectful to adults and peers alike.

Parents were sure that their kids would be safe in the classroom, would learn to read, write, do basic mathematics, home economics, learn life-long lessons of civics and citizenship, and skills applicable throughout adulthood.

Students were able to tell how many states form the United States, what the capital is, knew geography and history, the Constitution, their presidents, could write a cogent paragraph in proper and correctly spelled English, and knew their math tables.

Now students must spend time with social activism, social justice, learning Common Core math which reduces their performance on standardized tests even more; they must read sexually explicit stories, so explicit that the boards of education do not allow parents at meetings to read aloud the content of their children’s homework assigned by teachers following the Common Core curriculum.

Less than two decades ago, even without a college degree, high school graduates could read, write, do basic math, cook, balance checkbooks, could do simple math in their heads without a calculator, knew basic geography, basic history of their country, how to survive, fix a flat tire, change the oil in cars, cook, sew, learn useful skills in shop classes, raise a family, understood clearly the two biological sexes, and be respectful of life, born and unborn, and be generous and kind to others.

At the turn of the twentieth century, eighth graders could pass a difficult exam which most high school and college graduates today would be hard-pressed to even score in the lower fiftieth percentile.

In 2022, the pink haired, nose-ringed, lip-ringed, and heavily tattooed woke teachers are upset because they are not allowed to talk to their kindergarten and elementary school students about their sex partners, graphic sexual orientations, being transgender, and other immoralities. The mental and sexual baggage is so depraved that one wonders what is going to happen to our future generations exposed to such perversions in the classroom, often without parental knowledge.

It used to shock us when people with criminal records, liars, pedophiles, and habitual drunks became teachers and counselors in our public schools. Teachers who had sex with their underage students made headlines for months and years and they went to prison for their crimes against minors.

It was shocking to see college professors have steamy affairs with their students, yet nobody punished them in any way – liberals rolled their eyes and said, it was consensual sex. Never mind that the issues of professorial ethics and sexual harassment were not addressed.

It is now seen as tame for a public-school administrator to invite an imam to speak to students about the wonders of Islam shortly before his son and fiancé were caught trying to join ISIS. What exactly would American Christian students learn from such a speech that the attendance was made mandatory? And when did proselytizing for a non-Christian religion became compulsory in public schools? Liberals have been telling us for decades now that we cannot mix religion with public schools - we must be politically correct.

There is a shortage of teachers in our public schools because they have been habituated to “teach” from home in front of a computer and refuse to be in the classroom; they are afraid of a virus and want to wear a mask in perpetuity.

There is a shortage of teachers because the best, the brightest, and the most knowledgeable among them chose to leave the profession and pursue other ways to earn a living. With notable exceptions of the most dedicated and stellar teachers, the worst and the least prepared among the licensed ones chose to stay – they have few other avenues of employment.

There is a shortage of teachers because student discipline and behavioral issues caused by bad parenting or lack thereof have driven many teachers to renounce the profession. Administrators expected them to be first responders, doctors, nurses, counselors, and social workers, and to give students passing grades even though they had not earned them.

If you ask the National Education Association, the teacher shortage in all states can be explained by underfunding, poverty, and inequality. “Policymakers must take action to fix the underlying issues – underfunding, poverty, and inequality – that have dug us into the deep hole that we’re now in.” Teachers view the classrooms as “dangerous,” following the pandemic. “Teachers often have master’s degrees, even doctorate degrees, and yet they earn far less than other college graduates.” The Teacher Shortage Can Be Addressed — With Key Changes | NEA

The deep societal divide pushed daily by the mainstream media and Democrat politicians via their divisive policies is reflected in the classrooms. “Poverty, segregation, and inequality are huge issues, deeply embedded in American societies, and manifested in classrooms. Students come to school unprepared to learn, hungry or sick; parents have life circumstances that make it difficult for them to engage in their children’s learning; teachers’ safety and mental health is threatened.” The Teacher Shortage Can Be Addressed — With Key Changes | NEA

Societal issues reflect the sad reality that young generations now are not ready to be parents, have not learned how to be responsible adults themselves and are still relying on their parents for their survival. Some are hooked on drugs, alcohol, and on their smart phones, constantly taking selfies to post on TikTok, hoping that they will become the next Internet “influencer.”

Their role models are immature, entitled, narcissistic and whiny individuals, and are thus not ready to be parents. The main ingredient of a successful adult, personal responsibility, has never crossed their paths and lips. And their wild and misbehaved children, unfortunately, are now in the classrooms. Why would a low paid teacher deal with such parents and their children, in addition to teaching them?

Sadly, as a profession, teachers, good or bad, command little respect from society as a whole, even though they are the ones shaping America’s future by virtue of having your children’s ears and minds longer than any parent.

 

How Did He Subjugate So Many?

When I was growing up, I could not understand how an entire country was subdued into acceptance of their fate of living under the oppression of a tyrant installed in power by the Communist Party and the Soviet Bolshevik agents, a tyrant who was previously a shoe cobbler in his village of Scornicesti.

Yet this man, as Funderburk wrote, was able to “erase the past and construct a new man and society dependent upon the Communist Party and its organs of terror and intimidation.”  People were kept under the heavy boot of oppression because they were hungry, cold, controlled by abject fear, disarmed, and starved into submission by a huge army of Marxist cadre and well-armed militias and soldiers, composed of brothers, fathers, neighbors, and friends.

A few citizens in the more sparsely populated areas in the Carpathian Mountains, hid in the woods and kept their weapons, in opposition to the communists, but they were eventually rounded up and killed.

There was no place to hide from the well-paid informants of the Communist Party; often snitches were their own awfully close relatives, distant relatives, and even “best” friends turned informants, not because they believed in such an oppressive ideology, but because they wanted more food, medicine, medical care, and other scarce survival items.

Communist propaganda played each day on radio, television, political meetings, children’s shows, schools, and printed in newspapers, magazines, and on glossy posters. The music accompanying the daily propaganda was martial, somber, frightening, and deafening.

The Dear Leader was spoken of in biblical terms, he was the “creator of thought,” the “giver of strength,” and, in a Ministry of Truth Orwellian vein, he was the One who gave meaning and justification to our thoughts and ideas. Without him, a God-like figure, we were worth nothing, we were dust under his shoes.

We owned nothing in that miserable life, but we were NOT happy about it, just controlled into submission by fear and indoctrination. And it showed! You would have been hard-pressed to meet one smiling person on the street. Everybody frowned and crowded in never-ending store lines, on buses, and on trains, like sardines in a can. The evil and guilty, being driven around in fancy government-owned cars, controlled the good and the innocent.

Ceausescu was compared by his apparatchiks, poets, teachers, movie makers, writers, reporters, to famous historical figures like Stefan Cel Mare (Stephen the Great), Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler), the bloody thirsty prince from the mid-1400s who disposed of his enemies through strange methods of incarceration, torture, savage beatings, or summary and quite painful executions.

Ceausescu was, according to posters and recitations we had to make daily in meetings at school and work, the framer of the “multilaterally developed socialist society and Romania’s advance to communism.” All we knew was the reality of gurgling empty tummies, bare pantries, and headaches from insufficient daily intake of calories.

Ceausescu was aggrandized to the point that he was featured in every classroom, every office, every workshop, every factory, inside public buildings, outside buildings, in sculptures, portraits, military decorations, churches, icons, paintings, banners, statues, monuments, poems, plays, and monologues. Nothing happened in Romania without his approval. His elaborate portrait was next to those of ancient kings, princes, and voivodes.

On national holidays such as August 23, celebrating the victory over fascism, or the anniversary of the union of Transylvania with the rest of Romania, we had to march on the main boulevard, dressed in our pioneers’ uniform with the red bandana around the neck, carrying flags, placards with phrases like ‘Long live communism,’ and portraits of the Dear Leader; but it was not a real celebration for that occasion, it was a total deification of the tyrant, “the father of the country,” “the light of knowledge and wisdom,” and many other absurd and outlandish phrases invented by communists to venerate the cobbler dictator and his semi-literate wife who “owned” a scientific doctoral degree she never earned.

We lived in an alternate universe, The Twilight Zone of sorts, where bad people were in charge and good people were slaves to communism, to the Dear Leader and his family, who lived in the lap of luxury in exorbitant villas thanks to confiscatory stealing from citizens and the theft of the national patrimony and impoverishment of the country. His foreign bank accounts held millions of dollars while the oppressed masses starved.

During plenary meetings, worshipping party members and those in attendance stood up every two or three minutes, clapping and shouting praises for the glorification of the dictator Ceausescu. While it was standard protocol to stand during the entrance of a country’s leader, U.S. Ambassador David Funderburk refused to stand as often after the initial standing at his entrance, and was, according to his recollection, blacklisted.

The worshipping went so far that, on his 67^th birthday, Ceausescu was compared to Orion (“Luceafarul”), born at Scornicesti, “Nicolae with a laurel crown.” Imagine the nausea of having to take part in such surreal events.

Nobody dared to mention God on Romanian television, because, to the communists, atheism was their religion and Ceausescu was god. The word God had not been mentioned in the media after the Bolsheviks took over the country.

But one man, Ambassador David B. Funderburk, dared to use the word God in his July 4, 1982, television address to the Romanian people. Ambassador Funderburk recounts in his book, that month’s later church goers in the far north told him how dear and meaningful the word God was to them, knowing that it came from the President of the United States at the time, Ronald Reagan. . .... “Let us pray that God will guide us and future generations in preserving the liberty that is the essence of the American spirit.” (David B. Funderburk, Pinstripes and Reds, Selous Foundation Press, 1987, p. 107)

Ceausescu had an army of controllers on the Communist Party payroll, i.e., the dreaded Securitate, the economic police, the street police, factory activists, school activists, and informants on every city block, street, apartment complex, and each entrance to the many public buildings, churches, schools, hospitals, factories, and libraries.

Nothing was left to chance and everything and everybody was constantly watched. His army worked hard to track the rest of us because they had low level technology, no Internet, computers, and smart phones.

Doctors and nurses were ardent supporters of the police state and highly compliant. Teachers followed the directives of the Ministry of Education. Fear and extra pay to help one survive were strong motivators.

We could not turn to churches for comfort because most priests were also informants to the Securitate and were on Ceausescu’s payroll. They helped keep the praying masses subdued and under control. Churches were kept open for baptisms, weddings, and burials and as a way for Ceausescu to know when the small underground opposition organized events.

 

The "Friendship" Train of the Soviet Era

Photo: Vlad Ispas

An Internet vlogger named Noel posted a video of his trip on the “Prietenie” (Friendship) line, a Soviet era train, connecting from Bucuresti, Romania, to Chisinau, Republic of Moldova. He was excited to travel in the first class, Soviet-era style car, on a 13-hour overnight ride that involved changing the wheels on each train car before the Moldovan border, as their tracks were not the same size as the European ones, they were wider. He had hoped that wider train wheels would translate into a smoother ride across the border into Chisinau, but that was not the case.

The vlogger is overly enthusiastic about the prospect of traveling in Soviet-era comfort, just as he was thrilled, in a previous video, about his stay in a five-star hotel in Moscow, hotel reserved for Soviet and world dignitaries, such as the dictator Stalin and the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He was so ecstatic about staying in such a historical place, that he propped up his socked feet on the desk where Stalin allegedly signed important documents. I cannot say that I share the vlogger’s enthusiasm about Stalin, a killer of his own people.

Noel arrived at Gara de Nord in Bucharest, a very familiar place to me, having spent two years of my young adult life there during my daily commute to college, to and from my hometown of Ploiesti to the capital, Bucuresti, arriving and departing from Gara de Nord.

Seeing my old stomping grounds, I was overcome by an intense sadness and the tears of distress flowed. The place had not changed much since those two years of my youth, it only looked cleaner.

Noel boarded a very familiar-looking train, sporting a fresh coat of blue paint, but the same interior, albeit it much cleaner compared to long ago, with brocade drapes and worn-out carpets, something that second class train cars in the Soviet era did not have.

The W.C. (water closet) had the same stainless-steel commodes and sinks but so much cleaner than I remembered them. The daily commuters tried hard not to use the bathrooms on the train, we knew how disgusting they were. We just held our bladders for one hour or more until we reached Gara de Nord where we could use their facilities, a little bit cleaner, but quite smelly.

During my two years of commute to the university via the train and then the tram, I made lots of friends who either rode the train to work or to school like me – a railroad administrator, an ophthalmologist, college students, future architects, linguists, engineers, teachers, mechanics working for the railway system, a few doctors who were party-connected and lucky to practice medicine in the capital, a couple of theater actors, a ballet dancer, and my English college teacher who always said that I did not take her class seriously enough and nothing good will ever become of me.

We took the train daily at 5:35 a.m. and returned in mid- or late afternoon when classes were over, or work shifts ended. Late commuters sometimes jumped on the train as it started to move. Once I did the same, not realizing that the metal bars were iced over, and my hands would slip; I would have certainly fallen under the tracks had it not been for a quick and smart man who grabbed my coat collar and pulled me inside the train. That moment had been etched into my memory forever and it flashes through my mind from time to time.

Each morning, we were all sleepy, bleary eyed, standing and crowded in the dirty hallways, the seats were always occupied from the previous stations, packed like sardines in a can, looking through dirty windows at the passing landscape. We swayed back and forth as a single body as the train stopped and started abruptly after each station.

The controller would push his way through, squeezing this mass of humanity huddling in the hallways, to check for tickets or monthly passes. The tickets, although subsidized by the communist government running the country, were not cheap. My mom and dad struggled to pay for my monthly “abonament” (pass). And the train did not exhibit any of the “luxury” the vlogger encountered on the Moldova train.

Noel’s destination, the Republic of Moldova, formerly part of USSR, was carved out of Romania by the Soviets after WWII as war reparations. A large majority of inhabitants of Moldova are Romanians from the state of Moldova in the eastern part of Romania, who speak Romanian at home.

The vlogger was unhappy about his accommodation on the first-class train from the Soviet era – the bed was too uncomfortable, the ride very bumpy, and punctuated by constant jarring of stop and go, resulting in 13 hours of misery and inability to sleep. Everything was spartan and minimal but clean.

And our American Millennials, Generation Z, and others want socialism/communism instead of capitalism. Be careful what you wish for, you might get years of misery in your “utopia,” thinking about our National Anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance you protested against and bent the knee against at sports events.

 

Inflation and Recession

Economically speaking, the aggregate demand for the U.S. economy represents the quantity of domestic products in general that are demanded at each possible value of the price level. If there is too much money being printed and in circulation, an increase in the aggregate demand pushes the price level up. If the aggregate demand continues to increase month after month, the economy will suffer from inflation – a sustained increase in the general price level.

When production falls and people lose jobs, two consecutive quarters to be exact, the economy experiences a recession.

The mainstream media pundits, who are not economists, but communication or English majors, are twisting themselves into pretzels, trying to redefine the term recession to spare embarrassment to their favorite Democrat president, Joe Biden, and his disastrous economic policies. They are counting on most Americans, with or without a college degree, not knowing basics of Macroeconomics.

If recessions are deep and sustained, they turn into depressions. Here are events in economic history that had affected American families deeply:

-          the depression of the 1890s after the rapid industrialization and railroad prosperity

-          the panic of 1907

-          the postwar depression following WWI

-          the Great Depression of the 1930s

-          the postwar recession following WWII

-          the 1974-75 recession with serious stagflation in the U.S.

-          the 1982-83 recession

-          the 1990-91 recession 

-          current inflation and recession under President Joe Biden

The economy also experienced dramatic deflations, sustained decreases in the general price level, such as the post-Civil War deflation, in the 1870s, the 1880s, 1921-1922, and 1929-1933.

The decline in economic activity during the Great Depression was the most severe in our economic history until the lockdowns of Covid-19 in 2020 from which world economies are still struggling to recover from due to the disastrous government interference in the free markets.

The Great Depression taught us that recessions and inflations take a long time to self-correct, and the right combination of economic policies, fiscal and monetary, must be adopted by governments. Are these economic policies successful? Not all the time.

To power large economies, crude oil and coal are necessary for energy and economic growth, not the unreliable green energy, solar and wind. Governments are expected to manage their economies so that “recessions do not turn into depressions and depressions will not last as long as the Great Depression.”

When rapid inflation occurs while the economy is growing slowly (“stagnating”), or in a recession, then we experience stagflation such as that experienced in the 1970s in the U.S.

The Federal Reserve, which is neither federal nor a reserve, but a private corporation since 1913, controls monetary policy, money stock and interest rates. When a competent person is at the helm of the twelve regions’ federal reserve banks, the Federal Reserve (Fed) can take actions to influence aggregate demand by changing interest rates up or down, making borrowing more expensive or cheaper, or by altering the money stock (supply). The Fed engages in buying and selling of securities and the printing of new fiat (Latin for “let it be”) money not backed by any goods or services, to control interest rates and the money supply.

Can the government stabilize the economy with its fiscal policies (federal taxation) or even manage it correctly? As history shows, the answer is no. One of the reasons is the out of control spending that Congress engages in which requires more money that we do not have enough of from taxation, money which then must be printed by the Federal Reserve’s printing presses or borrowed from countries like China.

Printing so much money without the backing of goods and services devalues the currency, i.e., the dollar. During the American Revolution, one dollar was worth 2 ½ cents. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing runs the printing presses since 1862 and produces dollars (“greenbacks”), using the same magnetic ink and special cotton (75%) and linen (25%) paper made by Crane and Company since 1879.

So, is inflation bad for everyone? It is if you look at it as unlawful taxation forced upon all Americans because they must pay so much more for their food, gasoline, medical care, travel, entertainment, housing, energy, etc. It is worse for the elderly and people living on fixed incomes who do not qualify for or are too proud to ask for welfare.

Debtors can come ahead in an inflationary environment. Earning $100 you borrowed two years ago becomes easier. What you repay in real terms is much less than the $100 because the money you use to repay the lender will not buy now what it would have bought two years ago.