Jim Cramer – Mr. Potatohead

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If there was ever a financial show which should have the words, "For entertainment uses only" that would be Mad Money with Jim Cramer. It is no secret that Cramer's stock picks have done worse than the market averages. However, the other day, Cramer went off the deep end with a 14-minute rant of hyper-Keynesianism, historical revisionism of Herbert Hoover and blaming the Irish Potato famine of 1847 on laissez-faire.

Cramer says that the government cannot "print money fast enough" to save us from the mess the Federal Reserve got us into. Next Cramer launches into a tirade on how Herbert Hoover was a do-nothing president who didn't try to end the Great Depression, which of course was total nonsense. Anybody familiar with the work of Murray Rothbard or British historian Paul Johnson knows that Herbert Hoover was hardly an advocate of laissez-faire. Largest peacetime increase in USA history (up to 1931) in domestic spending occurred under Hoover. Likewise, Hoover fathered the Agricultural Marketing Act, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Emergency Relief and Construction Act.

What about Cramer's allegations that the Irish Potato famine was made worse by "it's the market's will" attitude by the British? It doesn't have a leg to stand on.

The Irish Potato Famine was indeed a bellwether moment in the history of Ireland. It was responsible for probably the death of over 1 million Irish men and women, lead to the massive immigration of Irish to the United States and is a period of time still etched in the folk music and national psyche of the Irish today.

But to get to Cramer's point. According to the Cecil Woodham-Smith, one of the foremost authorities on the Irish Famine noted in his 1962 book that during the entire time of the famine, Ireland was forced to export its food by British authorities. So while millions of Irish were starving for food during those five years, Ireland as a British colony was in fact a NET exporter of food.

There is reason why John Mitchel, the famous Irish journalist and founders of the Young Ireland Movement at the time wrote in 1860,

"I have called it an artificial famine: that is to say, it was a famine which desolated a rich and fertile island that produced every year abundance and superabundance to sustain all her people and many more. The English, indeed, call the famine a ‘dispensation of Providence’; and ascribe it entirely to the blight on potatoes. But potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe; yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The British account of the matter, then, is first, a fraud – second, a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.”

Mark Thornton of the Mises Institute noted in an issue of the Free Market on this very subject that the British government turned away charity ships full of food from the USA to Ireland because the British considered it would "disturb trade." Even worse, to save face, Queen Victoria demanded the Sultan of Turkey to reduce his donation of 10,000 to 1,000 because the Queen was only going to donate to Irish relief 1,000 of her personal income.

If that wasn't enough, the Poor Laws help contribute to the suffering and homelessness of thousands of Irish families. The financing of the Poor Laws fell on the local landlords in Ireland who in order to cut down their financial objections, simply evicted tenants. In 1849, 90,000 Irish tenants were evicted from their homes, the next year in 1850, another 104,000 lost their homes. One of the clauses in the Irish Poor Laws stated that a person could not even own a quarter of an acre of land to receive aid. Thus thousands of Irishmen simply sold everything they had to their landlord. Thus as the Irish said at the time, "men went into the poorhouse and a pauper came out."

In their book on the Irish Famine, editors Christopher Morash and Richard Hayes quote the London Times on March 24, 1847 which wrote of the British relief efforts.

"a mass of poverty, disaffection, and degradation without a parallel in the world. It allowed proprietors to suck the very lifeblood of that wretched race"

So contrary to Jim Cramer’s wild unsubstantiated rants, the misery caused by the blight (potato famine) is hardly an indictment of laissez-faire liberalism. Much to the contrary, the continuing suffering was exacerbated by mercantilism, political face-saving on the part of the Royal Family of Britain and the unintended consequences of the welfare state (Poor Laws).

October 6, 2008