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The Nazi Party's appeal to the pocketbook... pushing for safer handgun use... brining citizenship back into style... on currency reform... tomorrow's "professional citizens"
The logic of evil in Nazi
Germany Once he grew up and became a sociologist, Brustein searched for an answer to that question. He recently collaborated with Jurgen W. Falter of the University of Mainz on a comprehensive study of 42,000 Nazi Party records, and reached a conclusion much at variance to previous explanations for the Nazi Party's startling rise to power. His analysis has been published in The Logic of Evil: The Social Origins of the Nazi Party, 1925-1933 (Yale University Press, 1996). "This is the first time a rational-choice model from social science has been applied to Nazi Party membership," he says. "It's the largest and most systematic study of individual Nazi Party membership records that's ever been done. But what's unique here are my findings. I'm arguing that the people who were attracted to Nazism saw that the party's economic program addressed their material interests." That is, most people voted for the Nazis not out of xenophobia or hatred of Jews or as a protest to the Weimar government. They voted for their pocketbooks. They simply believed that the Nazis had the best economic program.
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"The objective was to get inflation down to zero, and that's
precisely what this system has done," says Hanke. "At the end of
December 1996, inflation was .1 percent." Upon Hanke's recommendation, Argentina instituted a system similar to the currency boards used by Estonia, Lithuania, and Hong Kong. These systems fully back a nation's currency with reserves of a stronger, fundamentally sound currency. The government sets an exchange rate between these two currencies, and then takes itself out of the picture; the exchange rate is now pegged, and the government can't meddle with it. "Before the reform, the Argentine currency wasn't backed," says Hanke. "So every time the government would go in the hole and need more money, it would call the central bank and print pesos. All the currency reform does is lock the exchange rate of the Argentine peso at par with the U.S. dollar--one peso equals one dollar. Furthermore, now all pesos that are issued have to be backed by 100 percent U.S. dollar reserves, so a peso literally is as good as a dollar now." Once the value of the peso stabilized and people regained confidence in the currency, capital began coming into the country, rather than flowing out. "Currency reform gave President Menem's government a lot of credibility, because he had delivered on the most immense problem facing Argentina," says Hanke. "Once he got credibility, he could go in and introduce good sound economic policy." Argentine citizens again had money that actually could buy something, and the economy began to grow. "Nineteen ninety-six saw President Menem reelected, with no major opposition from any of the three major political parties, as far as the currency system was concerned. Things got completely stabilized, and now the economy is roaring again. It might get close to 7 percent growth again this year." --DK
Training tomorrow's "professional
citizens" He believes the attitude pendulum may be swinging back toward compassion, and he is using that motion to breathe new life into a notion that has fallen by the wayside of American education: namely, that it's possible to teach young adults to be "professional citizens." Citizenship is more than voting and saluting the flag, Salamon says. "It's basically the idea that every individual has an obligation to solve society's problems"--an idea that has become the keystone of IPS's Master of Arts in Policy Studies (MAPS) program. The W.W. Kellogg Foundation, swayed by the dirth of university programs devoted to teaching citizenship, recently awarded IPS a $1.5 million grant to further the MAPS program. Part of the funding will be used to "export" the citizenship curriculum to universities across the nation, through books, course materials, and even a nationwide citizenship essay contest, Salamon says. At Hopkins, there are currently 26 students involved in the MAPS graduate program. Most arrive "already convinced of the significance of being a good citizen," says sociology professor Matthew Crenson, who teaches the MAPS course Citizenship and the Policy Professional. "I think that unless you have some sense of your obligation to a larger public, you haven't really experienced everything you need to experience to be a fully formed human being," Crenson says. "It's an idea that goes back to the days of Plato and Aristotle: if you aren't engaged in public endeavor, you are something less than a human being." --CAR Written by Melissa Hendricks, Dale Keiger, and Christine Rowett.
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