Nuclear Powers

Economics, Autonomy, and Legal Threats to the Family On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped a nuclear atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, killing up to 90,000 people. Modern scientists had discovered how to split the nucleus of the atom and destroy a city. I was born six years later into a nuclear family in Detroit, Michigan. I first lived with my parents and two older siblings in a bedroom of my grandparents’ house. They were immigrants from Scotland. A 1940 census of our neighborhood shows that our neighbors were immigrants from Czechoslovakia, French Canada, Greece, Italy, Poland, Russia, and Scotland. My father’s parents lived nearby. His father emigrated from the Russian Empire, and his mother from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. What brought all these people to Detroit from around the world? Many would say, economics. There were plentiful well-paying jobs in the factories of American automakers Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler, the Dodge Brothers, and William Durant (founder of General Motors). The demand for automobiles was explosive. Detroit grew quickly. In 1900, it had 285,700 people. By 1930 it had 1,568,700. It had grown more than five-fold in just 30 years! Home Economics The Age of Enlightenment appears successful because its science produced the industrial revolution, modern medicine, atomic power, and computers. However, the Enlightenment failed to understand economics. John D. Mueller argues in Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element that modern views of economics suffer from the omission of factors that previously had been considered central. Basically, there are four activities key to classical human economics, as developed by Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle and Augustine: Humans produce, exchange, distribute, and consume goods. However, in his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, credited as a founder of modern economics, eliminated two of the four elements: distribution and 
Please subscribe or log in to read the rest of this content.
Categories: