Tea at Trianon: The Spirit of Frugality

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, September 7, 2025

The Spirit of Frugality

From Jeffrey Tucker at Brownstone Institute:

America specializes in making trash and throwing things away. We see that as a symbol of how prosperous we are. Our ancestors did not think this way. They saw prosperity as linked with how much they could save and how little they spent unnecessarily.

Economics teaches that savings requires deferred consumption. That means thinking about the future more than the present. Savings is also the foundation of investment. Investment is the basis of prosperity. Add it all up and you get this: sacrificing the comforts of today is the key to a better tomorrow.

Hardly anyone would argue with the above. It is stated very plainly in ways that make it entirely logical and unobjectionable.

And yet let’s add in one word: macroeconomics, especially as interpreted by John Maynard Keynes. He posited such a thing as the “paradox of thrift.” This happens when people save too much and don’t spend. Aggregate demand goes down and crushes producer hopes.

Business dries up, so we fall into depression, in Keynes’s view, which requires the central bank to print money and Congress to spend even to the point of national indebtedness. That’s the real key to prosperity, said Keynes: running up big debts and printing your way out. Also, government should take over investment.

I’m not going to explain the above further because it is wholly wrong. It is entirely based on fallacies punctuated by complicated language. That was Keynes’s specialty. He somehow managed to bamboozle generations of academics and lawmakers into setting their common sense on the shelf.

A casualty of Keynesianism was the gradual deprecation of frugality in American culture. This is the theme of the third chapter of Eric Sloane’s book. He too begins with reflections on thrift stores as symbols of frugality and its abandonment. (Read more.)