Connecting Dots

Gray Grantham: You want to talk about the brief?
Darby Shaw: Everyone I have told about the brief is dead.
Gray Grantham: I'll take my chances.
--The Pelican Brief

Murray Rothbard once observed that people often fail to grasp the context in which politicians make their decisions. People seem to figure that policians were just dipped into political office temporarily, and that the background context before, during, and after their office tenure doesn't matter much.

Rothbard thought that it mattered a ton. Indeed, one of his greatest strengths was tracing the connections of public figures to special interests who want to influence the market for political favor. He masterfully connects the people involved in the development of the Federal Reserve to the interests of the bankers in his History of Money and Banking in the United States.

He does so again to explain the influence of the Morgan and Rockefeller interests in the advent of world war. Hard not to raise an eyebrow or two when you see how densely populated public offices were with reps from these two camps.