Bubble. In less than a year, avaricious speculators had driven the price of South Sea stock from 100 to 1,000 British pounds per share. Frenzied investors fueled the creation of entirely bogus companies with no assets and no business plans. One such organization advertised itself as “a company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.” Even this scam attracted investors—from aristocrats to laborers. Parallel bubbles swelled in Amsterdam and Paris. When the South Sea Bubble burst in 1721, thousands of businesses went bankrupt, and tens of thousands of
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was the primary author of our Declaration of Independence, arguably the most consequential political document of modern times. He served as the third President of the United States (1801-09), the summit of a distinguished life in public office that included Governor of Virginia (1779-81), Minister to France (1785- 89), and Secretary of State for George Washington (1790-93). Beyond such conspicuous service, he was also a lawyer, architect, naturalist, inventor, philosopher, and founder of the University of Virginia.
existing fault lines. We cannot even begin to estimate the political, economic, and social costs of COVID-19, for they are still being incurred. Everyone used to wonder what “the new normal” would look like, but now we know: in many respects, it more closely resembles “the new abnormal.” Every century has witnessed such upheavals and their global repercussions. World War I (1914- 18), the crash of Wall Street in 1929, and their after-effects, were likewise epoch-changing. So were the Napoleonic Wars of 1803-1815, including the War of 1812, and their aftermaths. That period ravaged Europe economically but also spurred science, incubated industry,
Yet he remained humble about his extraordinary accomplishments.
“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” (letter to Benjamin Rush, 1800)
people were ruined. Composer George Frederick Handel was among the celebrities of the day who took the South Sea Bubble bath. The British Parliament investigated the collapse, only to discover corruption not only among company directors, but even among government cabinet ministers. Guilty parties were disgraced, convicted, and imprisoned. The scandal left such an impact that Thomas Jefferson wrote to Yancy about it in 1816, as a prime example of the kind of vice that needs to be prevented, both among leaders and in the general populace. Jefferson warned:
When French Foreign Minister Count de Vergennes heard that he was replacing Benjamin Franklin as Minister, Jefferson responded, “I succeed. No man can replace him.” Jefferson’s immortal ideal, that we all have God-given rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is not just an enlightened political celebration of self-governance: it also implies corollary obligations to others in moral, social, and economic dimensions. Paramount among these are his philosophy of economics and wealth creation, and his abhorrence of corruption, wanton government spending, and long- term debt.
and furthered human rights. Economist Joseph Schumpeter calls such cathartic episodes “creative destruction.”
Jefferson’s 1815-1816 correspondence with Colonel Charles Yancy of Albermarle contains an exchange on the question of legitimate versus illegitimate wealth creation. Jefferson’s moral compass was perturbed not only by then-ongoing myriads of criminal misdeeds engendered by Napoleon’s volcanic rise and fall, but also by long-term aftershocks of an economic earthquake a century earlier. In 1720, the British Empire experienced a massive financial meltdown known as the South Sea
Our post-pandemic world order has shifted tectonically along pre-
“The American mind is now in that
| The Bellwether |
Powered by FlippingBook