Sound of grinding teeth from the Derb residence as JD peruses his

subscription copy of The Economist.

“In the last week of August, New Yorlers will leave their city in droves.

This is not because they fear that the Republican convention will provide a

lure for terrorists. The real reason is an even greater fear: meeting a

Republican.”

Fair enough, and good knockabout fun at the expense of New Yorkers, a

mouth-breathing lot with the collective political good sense of a Bonobo

chimp colony.

There follow some stats on the paucity of GOP office-holders in the Great

Wen. Then this:

“This antipathy toward Republicans is not new. Since the second world war,

Republicans have sent to the White House two George Bushes, Ronald Reagan,

Gerald Ford [Eh? Americans didn’t exactly *send* him… but never mind],

Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower. None won New York City’s vote. The

last Republican to do so was Calvin Coolidge, whose legacy was the economic

bubble leading to the Depression.”

Well, to be sure, the business cycle had higher peaks and deeper troughs 75

years ago than it has today, when we have learned to damp it down a bit; but

the implication here — that the “Coolidge prosperity” of the late 1920s

*caused* the Depression is preposterous, except in the trivial sense that

troughs followed (and still follow) from peaks by the natural rhythm of

national economic activity.

The fact that the Depression was not just a trough, but an extraordinarily

prolonged trough, has to do with the way the economy was managed in the

early and mid 1930s, by which time Silent Cal was out of office.

So I have always thought, anyway. If anyone has a good sound proof that

Coolidge’s policies caused the 12-year collapse in national economic

vitality (or that Franklin Roosevelt’s peacetime policies cured it!) I’d be

glad to hear from you.