Economics and War: A Pyramid Club Jude Wanniski April 26, 1999

Memo To: My Website army of fans, browsers & clients
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Psst!! Bad economics causes war. Pass it along.

I've received such good response from my weekend posting on "Economics and War" that I decided to use it to test the power of the Internet -- with a pyramid club. I'm going to ask you to read the essay if you have not already and forward it to two or three friends and ask them to do the same. The essay is very unusual in that it explains the connection between economics and war in ways that will surprise anyone who reads it. It will explain why World War II happened and why the Vietnam war happened and why we are now making war on Yugoslavia. If I tried to get it printed in the mainstream press, I would fail, because it is so far out of the mainstream. If I sent it to a little radical periodical, almost nobody would see it, and it would be dismissed as crackpot stuff. With the Internet, I begin with a base of 5,000 folks who visit me daily, who are not radicals or crackpots. And I assume neither are your friends, relatives and co-workers. So let's try a pyramid club to test the reach and power of this new medium. Matt Drudge has been hugely successful in getting out news nobody else will print. Let's try informed opinion. If you have the e-mail address of your local newspaper or radio/tv news station, pitch it at them. It will not work very well the first time out, I think, but perhaps with time we can make a difference.

The thought occurred to me over the weekend when my daughter Jennifer asked me if we weren't getting all the news about Kosovo. She was surprised when I said no, because "it's on the news all the time." I explained that she should imagine a husband and wife getting into a fight, and everyone in the neighborhood thinks it's because the wife is a witch. They gather around the husband and he tells them how it all happened, and of course they are more certain than ever that she is a witch. Maybe one or two neighbors ask her what happened, but they are sure she is a witch and is lying. That's what's been happening in the Balkans, I said. Our Political Establishment agrees that the Serbs are to blame for all that has happened and that they must be punished. Because there is no disagreement, the Serbs and their leader, Slobodan Milosevic, are known to be monsters, rapists, butchers, etc., and anyone who says otherwise is said to favor appeasement of the brutes, the same way we appeased Adolf Hitler. We can't let the Establishment manipulate ordinary Americans that way -- demanding we join their lynch mob. Read "Economics and War" and please pass it along.