Blue Eagle Redux

4 March 2009 at 11:45 am Peter G. Klein 5 comments

| Peter Klein |

aara_logo_2 Assuming this is not a joke, Obama has unveiled a new stimulus-plan logo. Projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — primarily roads and bridges, I presume — will sport this handsome emblem. It lacks the 1930s-era fascist style of the NRA’s Blue Eagle but is much in the same spirit. Will those who maintain these roads and bridges be fined for failing to display the logo? (Business owners without a Blue Eagle could be fined up to $500 — more than $8,000 in today’s dollars — and get six months in jail.) Will consumers be encouraged to bycott those without the colorful insignia?

blueeagle Jason Taylor and I have written that the Blue Eagle may be more important than economic historians have realized. In the early days of the NRA it seems to have played a strong cartel-enforcement role. Eventually business owners and consumers learned that NRA officials were not punishing cartel violations and the Blue Eagle began to disappear from store windows and newspaper advertisements. Our analysis is game-theoretic, but I’m sure our friends from that other discipline would proffer a different explanation based on institutional legitimacy and that stuff.

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Business/Economic History, Institutions, Public Policy / Political Economy.

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5 Comments Add your own

1. Chris | 4 March 2009 at 2:24 pm

This has got to be a joke. There’s no way the administration can be planning to stamp an O-shaped emblem on all those projects.
2. Warren Miller | 4 March 2009 at 7:32 pm

The joke, Chris, is this pathetic administration whose rhetoric seems to have anestetized the public. The president is so economics- and finance-challenged that he didn’t know ‘price-earnings ratio’ today. Of course, he didn’t have his teleprompter. All he could finally come up with was ‘earnings ratio.’ He’s a rookie making dumb-a** rookie mistakes (the letter to Medvedev, for instance). And he’s just plain ignorant of history. Spending never got us out of any downturn. Then again, in his speech to Congress last week, he thought that the automobile was invented in the U.S. Rookies, all.
3. Geheg3D | 5 March 2009 at 3:25 pm

I agree with you Warren, but you don’t have to know what a P/E ratio is in order to understand supply and demand and Hazlitt’s One Lesson.
4. Mr Caps | 17 March 2011 at 12:05 am

NRA? Fascist logo? That particular style of eagle logo didn’t take on any fascist cognition until the Nazi’s incorporated it into the Third Reich and didn’t get any real notice until World War II.

I would also add that having an eagle logo of any kind doesn’t necessarily mean an organization is fascist,
it merely demonstrates that the Nazi’s didn’t have a monopoly on any particular style of eagle logo.

I am not an NRA member
5. Peter Klein | 17 March 2011 at 12:07 am

Um, you do know that NRA stands for National Recovery Administration, right?