We get the story of the Oompa-Loompas and Augustus goes up the pipe. Parables about benign exploitation and colonialization followed by a short tale of gluttony.
📖 Read loc 1440-2080 of 12932 (16.08%) of American Amnesia by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
Examples and discussion of how markets can manage to fail and why we need good government to fill in the (gaping) holes.
There’s also some good discussion of rent seeking behavior here too. The more I read, the more I think this should be required reading for everyone. I could see a need for taking just the first three chapters and expanding them out into their own book.
The big day finally arrives and the children enter the chocolate factory with Mr. Willy Wonka. We see the chocolate waterfall and river and see the first Oompa-Loompas.
I’m not quite sure how Mr. Wonka (and interestingly he’s always called Mr.), managed to get sunlight down into his underground chocolate room–I’m presuming all the edible plants grow somehow.
Circumstances for our poor hero Charlie become far more desperate before they begin to turn for the better.
Except that we’ve just read how horrifically poor and physically starving the family was, I’m surprised that he took two candy bars. Though I suspect his family would easily have given him the who dollar’s worth of food.
📖 Read loc 962-1440 of 12932 (11.13%) of American Amnesia by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
This continues to be intriguing with lots of examples (and footnotes, which I’ve been skipping over presently, but will circle back upon later). It continues to make a strong argument for a mixed economy and even bolsters with evidence that the richest countries are usually the ones with the most government–something which flies in the face of traditional Republican values. There’s also some good discussion of what markets are and aren’t capable of, a point which is often missed in the bigger public, potentially because of the decades of chanting that capitalism is best while we fought a cold war with Russia.
More people should really be concerned with externalities in the markets.
In general this seems to be a sweeping meta-analysis of lots of other sources and material, most of which is footnoted. I do sometimes wish they went into greater detail on many of their points, but I suspect that no one else would be reading the book because of its length. Their arguments are fairly quick and to the point however.
I suspect at the time this was written many of these horrid children were hyperbole. It now seems like people accidentally read this as a model for how children should be and they totally missed the fact that Charlie was the hero.
Donald Trump was 18 years old when this book was released. Sadly, I strongly suspect he never read or benefited from it.
