Marginalia

Province of Alberta "Prosperity Certificate" c. 1936

     In the early 1930s, Alberta radio evangelist "Bible" Bill Aberhart became a convert to the Social Credit monetary theory which stated that the cause of capitalism's ills was simply that people didn't have enough money to buy what they needed. The answer therefore was to simply print more money and give it to them. They'd then inject that money into the economy and the Great Depression would be vanquished - not with socialism but capitalism. In 1935, Aberhart's Social Credit Party won the Alberta Provincial election but when he tried issuing Prosperity Certificates like the one above, Ottawa immediately declared them illegal.

    I've always thought there was a strong similarity between Keynesian and Social Credit economics. The former depends on the government to infuse cash directly into the economy through infrastructure spending while the latter depends on the government to infuse cash indirectly into the economy by printing more. Now that I think about it, there seems to be very little difference between prosperity certificates and food stamps - which are one of the most effective forms of stimulus available.

   It's sort of strange then that these Conservatives, which grew out of the Preston Manning's Reform Party, seem to abhor stimulus, (only agreeing to a program when their government was threatened with non-confidence in January 2009). Especially when one considers how deeply the Social Credit Party of Alberta  (led by Manning's father Ernest after Aberhart) were informed by it.

Marginalia

Japanese Balloon Bomb - circa 1945.

I just found out about these things. The Japanese launched thousands of these balloons from Honshu against the Pacific coast of the United States and Canada in the final months of fighting during World War II. The idea was to use the existing air streams to carry them across the Pacific and have them trigger forest fires in the Northwest. They didn't really work, apparently they only killed six people in a single incident (a woman and five children in Oregon came across one while picnicking and accidentally set it off) and none triggered any forest fires. The Japanese abandoned the program in April 1945, 4 months before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Anyways, I find this kind of thing pretty fascinating - we tend to focus on the grand narratives of history, which is fine, but in doing so things like these slip through the cracks and be forgotten, which is a shame.