Friday, October 19th, 2018
I’m a member of the Silent Generation. That is the one immediately preceding the Boomers. I came along near the end of the Silent Generation, after the United States had entered World War II. Therefore, we were also referred to as war babies.
As we traveled through our educational life in those days, two required courses in high school were a study of the state government and a study of the American government. In the American government course, we touched on the various economic systems – including a comparison of capitalism to communism. But that was an insignificant part of the course. That was as close to a study of economics as we came in those days.
However, I got an in-depth lesson on communism as we studied J. Edgar Hoover’s book, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight it. Those were the days of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. It was important to study how the enemy, what President Reagan later called “an evil empire,” was attempting to influence America with its tyranny. As I recall, this was not a part of the school curriculum, but a project in one of the school clubs. While we studied Marx’s science of communism, this was not a study of micro or macroeconomics
