I never thought I’d do it. I’m about to quote a Marxian witticism.

It’s the first two sentences of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonapart. This is what Karl Marx said, this is what that great and evil thinker said:

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.

Self-refuting, perhaps. Apply the sentence to the two relevant names: Hegel plays the comic figure; Marx, obviously, the tragic. Following Hegel, enthusiasts would speak airily of the Spirit and of History and so forth — you know, granola-crunchy college-educated nonsense; following the younger thinker, Marx, enthusiasts would kill hundreds of millions of people.

But let’s play along. Take the Great Depression. That was tragic. Right?

Now take our current economic downturn. Nonsense is being uttered about it from the highest turrets of our best universities to, uh, the depths of Salon.com and the Daily Kos.

It has taken years to clear away fact from nonsense about the Great Depression. Scholars have labored in backwater colleges as well as prominent universities, sifting truth from propaganda about that inglorious time.

They certainly labored against a deluge. Franklin Delano Roosevelt has received so many encomia that the monument of verbiage covers over any truth. For years there, it seemed everyone treated FDR as the second coming of George Washington. Even Ronald Reagan admitted to admiring FDR.

But the scholars did their work. Murray Rothbard explained how the Federal Reserve brought the Great Depression into existence, and demonstrated that Herbert Hoover was anything but laissez-faire. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz showed exactly how the money supply collapsed after the initial busts. A horde of scholars have noted the amazing and awful destructive powers of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, helping kill production in the U.S., thereby exacerbating an already bad situation. And, more recently, economic historian Robert Higgs has shown how FDR’s New Deal policies inspired a complete lack of producer confidence, making sure the Depression lasted longer. Indeed, this “regime uncertainty” got worse after FDR’s second round of New Deal nonsense.

Yes, the Great Depression was tragedy: Ruining lives and fortunes and corrupting our political system — even unto the degradation of our written Constitution, which remains intact about like how we say a zombie remains intact.

Sorting this tragedy out, by scholars, has taken a long time. Explaining it has not been easy. Getting these truths accepted, harder yet.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, in fear and panic people are throwing out every preciously gained insight. How? As a matter of course, in the current frantic orgy of overspending money we don’t have.

It’s one of the costs of doing bailouts. You have to throw out reason.

How low can this farce go? Well, any downturn that sets politicians to offer bailing out failing newspapers has descended low indeed.

When I first read about this a few weeks ago, I could barely process the notion. Reuters quoted a former editor of the Miami Herald as arguing, in a nutshell, that “democracy” has an “obligation” to “help preserve” a “free press”:

“I truly believe that no democracy can remain healthy without an equally healthy press,” said [Tom] Fiedler, now dean of Boston University’s College of Communication. “Thus it is in democracy’s interest to support the press in the same sense that the human being doesn’t hesitate to take medicine when his or her health is threatened.”

There are so many lapses to his perfect analogy that, well, it almost takes the breath away. Continued...