The Electoral College II
Lead: Despite the general disdain with which Americans regard the Electoral College, on balance it has proven to have its good points.
Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.
Content: The College tends to decrease, but of course not eliminate, the practice of fraud and corruption by reducing the opportunities for vote swindling to the few states where the vote is very close. The Hayes-Tilden disaster 1876 was utterly corrupt but the fraud was so obvious that it ruined any claim that Hayes had to a mandate and ushered in the long reign of Jim Crow in the South. Fortunately, he turned out to be a better President than the election that gave him the White House might have indicated.
The Electoral College I
Lead: It is among America’s least popular constitutional creations, yet the nation cannot rid itself of the cranky, musty way of electing its President, the Electoral College.
Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.
Content: The founders never really intended it to be the way the Chief Executive was elected. They expected it to be an elaborate nominating committee. In a largely rural Republic where distances prevented all but a very few candidates from attaining true national stature, the College would elevate several. They would then be referred to the House of Representatives which would choose the President and Vice-President. After the unanimity of the two elections of George Washington, however, the election of the President degenerated into a series of closely contended cat fights highlighted by the growth of what the founders said they hated most, factions and political parties.
Honus Wagner Trading Card
Lead: Emerging from the heady days of the alliance between tobacco and baseball, the Honus Wagner Trading Card is an extremely rare piece of memorabilia, fetching in 2007 an anonymous Ebay purchase for a whopping $2.35 million.
Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.
Content: Almost from inception the American tobacco industry understood the value of advertising in the rising popularity of the national pastime, baseball. Somehow it all fit together. Tobacco use on and off the field was almost universal with players, managers, and the fans all chewing and puffing away at the pungent weed. One of the earliest forms of baseball advertising was the baseball card, absent the modern statistical or biographical information - just a player’s picture and often in a numbered series which encouraged buyers to repeatedly purchase the company’s products.
Keynes vs Hayek IV
Lead: Despite the advocacy of their partisans, the alleged rivalry between John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich August Hayek was more apparent than real. Hayek particularly made his greatest impact in the world of politics.
Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.
Content: Keynes’ greatest contribution was in the arena of macroeconomics, particularly the activity of the state in creating orderly capital markets and creation and re-stimulation of demand in time of recession. Even conservative economists and politicians recognized this insight and often insist on stimulation in order to get business activity started back up when it is down. Richard Nixon once significantly opined, “we are all Keynesians now.” Keynes’ theories have largely dominated scholarly and academic economics since the 1930s.