Posted on 04/21/2009 4:38:49 AM PDT by rightwingintelligentsia
There aren’t any sex scenes or vampires, and it won’t help you lose weight.
But House Republicans are tearing through the pages of Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man” like soccer moms before book club night.
Shlaes’ 2007 take on the Great Depression questions the success of the New Deal and takes issue with the value of government intervention in a major economic crisis — red meat for a party hungry for empirical evidence that the Democrats’ spending plans won’t end the current recession.
“There aren’t many books that take a negative look at the New Deal,” explained Republican policy aide Mike Ference, whose boss, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia, invited Shlaes to join a group of 20 or so other House Republicans for lunch earlier this year in his Capitol suite.
“Republicans are gobbling it up — and so are other lawmakers — because it tells you what they did, what worked and what didn’t.”
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
This is on my list to get.
I’m schlepping through the 5000 year leap right now.
I would also suggest “FDR’s Folly” , “Wilson’s War” and “Bully Boy” by Jim Powell
I’m intrigued by Glen Beck’s theory about the progressive movement. I think he’s on to something.
Much more reading and research required.
BINGO!
Speaking of Devouring-
Amity Shlaes:
“The government is like a lobster. It will eat anything, it wants to survive, it will compete with anything, and it can be a cannibal. When you look back at the ’30s using the public choice lens, what you discover is the extent to which the Depression wasn’t about a virtuous government and bad businesspeople. Rather, it was about people in office competing with the private sector for power.”
I'm sure there are vampires in it; Amity just doesn't know who they are to identify them.
And any book will help you lose weight, if you read it on the treadmill, or even in a recliner while *not eating*!
FDR’s Folly is a great book — exhaustively and brilliantly researched, and very detailed.
LOL!
What we need is a new vampire series.
Good honest people get elected - but once they get to DC - they seem to “change” into something else.
What REALLY is going on at those cocktail parties?
I’ll add them to the list.
Excellent book. Well documented and scholarly with plenty of references in the bibliography.
Truth will hurt liberals. We just need to keep the truth at the forefront, not like the MSM who seek to hide or distort the truth.
Here it is on amazon for $9.57:
http://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Man-History-Great-Depression/dp/0060936428
The author adds a couple of cogent comments farther down the page.
Dr. Burton Folsom of Hillsdale College released ‘New Deal or Raw Deal’ last February and I would recommend it as well. He was on Glenn Beck a few times and the book is very readable for a subject heavy on economics.
“Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Joins the Undead.” It could be a best-seller!
Don’t these politicians know any history?
The 1929 depression lasted until Pearl Harbor was bombed.
Nothing the government did had any good effects.
Do we have to wait until we are bombed again to get out of this politically generated recession?
HA HA!!!
I love it!
There’s no way that wouldn’t fly off the shelves!
Exactamundo! Why do these clymers need a book to do the thinking for them? If they had conservative, small government principles to start with, they wouldn’t be looking for cover to justify themselves.
“The government is like a lobster. It will eat anything, it wants to survive, it will compete with anything, and it can be a cannibal. When you look back at the ’30s using the public choice lens, what you discover is the extent to which the Depression wasn’t about a virtuous government and bad businesspeople. Rather, it was about people in office competing with the private sector for power.”
It’s a weak argument. “Government” is that institution that has a monopoly on the initiation of physical force; it is, by definition, NOT a part of the market, and therefore by nature, NON-COMPETITIVE. Government does not “compete” with the private sector: it usurps; it redistributes; it taxes; it punishes; it operates according to the principal of BUREAUCRACY, not the principal of COMPETITION.
I don’t know what a “policy aide” is or what he does, but he is simply ignorant of economics and the vast literature by economists criticizing the New Deal. Most Republicans obviously have not read Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics In One Lesson”, or Murray Rothbard’s “America’s Great Depression,” or anything by Ludwig von Mises.
I have very mixed reviews so far of Amity Shlaes’s book. On the one hand, I suppose any book that retells the story of the failure of import tariffs, wage and price controls, and government job schemes is welcome; on the other hand, it’s unfocused, rambling, and concentrates on personalities rather than on principles of economics. I always have a slight headache after reading a chapter, which I alleviate by reading a few pages from Thomas Sowell’s excellent “Applied Economics” and “Basic Economics.”
Republicans need to understand ECONOMICS, not necessarily ECONOMIC HISTORY; those are two different thnings. After reading Shlaes, Cantor & Co. might conclude “Ah, I see where FDR went wrong: he had bad people in charge of otherwise good policies. I have better people, so my attempt to plan the economy and inflate/spend our way out of a depression would work.”
The jury is still out, but Shlaes appears to me to be a kind of economic “Institutionalist” (like Arthur Burns, who ran the National Burea of Economic Research, which generated many empirical/historical studies of the results of economic policy); that is, someone who doesn’t really accept the idea that economics is a body of LAW — similar, though not identical in nature to laws of physics — but, rather, it comprises mere “social habits” conditioned by the kinds of legal and social institutions a society happens to have. If the New Deal didn’t work, it’s not because it attempted to circumvent (or short-circuit) economic law; it’s because the policies didn’t have the right combination of laws, institutions, and personal leadership.
Shlaes gave a very revealing interview with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institute. You can find it easily on YouTube.
As I say, I’m still reading her book and the jury is still out, but so far, it doesn’t look hopeful.
What happened?
Now, today, dim-0-crats rule again. Their time in the wilderness was brief, but the lessons of political power and its exercise were updated and honed with renewed vigor.
What is happening today? Will dim-0-crats realize the permanent majority sought and maintain the political royalty as now in power?
FDR did not "fix" the system; he "changed" the system. It is called statism or socialism.
There could be a great inaugural ball scene, where only *some* of the attendees have a reflection in the mirror ...
Of course, to include the Obama Administration, we’d have to have zombies, too.
Too much to do not enough time to do it all.
Better late than never.
Which is?
ML/NJ
It has clearly been demonstrated that the government overrules the market. It may not be in Webster’s as part of the market, but it is not reading Webster, apparently. If you are talking my local market, it is influenced by government. Government can raise or lower taxes and fees associated with doing business, thereby defining many areas of business. If you are talking Wall Street... until recently, government has made a few laws and regulations which have dramatically caused the market to crash and rally. The government most certainly competes with the private sector by subsidizing one business and not the other.
I think Webster’s dictionary of government is an equally weak argument based on real events that provide evidence to the contrary.
His opinion is that’s where things went off the rails. Massive government intrusion into private business, etc.
I think he’s on to something.
Same Old New Deal?
by George Will (163 comments) http://townhall.com/columnists/GeorgeWill/2008/11/30/same_old_new_deal
More on FDR and his “New Deal”
A few Excerpts
When accepting the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1932, Roosevelt proclaimed “a new deal” for the American people. Once in office, he began radically transforming the federal government while seeking to ameliorate the nation’s woes. He pushed subsidies for farmers, changed the banking system, and created the National Recovery Administration, which regulated many aspects of business until it was declared unconstitutional in 1935. Through the creation of the Social Security system and related programs, Roosevelt vastly expanded the scope and size of the federal government and created the political world in which we live. The shift was so complete that even as vocal a foe of big government as Ronald Reagan, who started his political career as a New Deal Democrat, approvingly wrote to Congress in the early 1980s of the “nation’s ironclad commitment to Social Security” and praised FDR’s visionary leadership in creating the program.
In her meticulously researched new history of the Depression, The Forgotten Man (HarperCollins), journalist Amity Shlaes describes the received catechism of the era: “Roosevelt made things better by taking charge. His New Deal inspired and tided the country over. In this way, the country fended off revolution of the sort bringing down Europe. Without the New Deal, we would all have been lost..The attitude is that the New Deal is the best model we have for what government must do for weak members of society, in both times of crises and times of stability.” But that conventional account, she writes, fails to capture “the realities of the period.” Shlaes shows how both Hoover and Roosevelt “overestimated the value of government planning” and intensified and prolonged the very problems they were seeking to fix.
One of the important things about the existing argument is that it’s all about Keynesianism, about whether government spending can cure the economy when it’s ill. Scholars have overlooked the cost of uncertainty in an economy, what we would now call the “unknown unknowns.” Both the Hoover and Roo-sevelt administrations (but especially the Roosevelt administration) were so unpredictable. That hurt the economy very much, and when I went back and saw the extent I was astounded. Uncertainty is a factor that I thought needed to be explored. There were lots of people who said, “I will not invest ‘til I know what’s going to happen.” ...
Roosevelt’s advisers didn’t know Stalin was a monster, or at least not so much, and very naively they copied him. In the book I trace how some of the characters go to the Soviet Union in 1927 and are bowled over by Stalin. They get six hours with him and they come back and you see them, especially [former Columbia University professor] Rex Tugwell, implementing things they learned from fascist Italy or from the world of Stalin. The influence of these European entities from Russia to Italy was not parenthetical. These people were not working for Moscow, but they were influenced by Moscow.
One of the members of the junket was a very well-known writer named Stuart Chase, an accountant who wrote about economics. He wrote a book called The New Deal, and it appeared in 1932, and that’s where Roosevelt got the phrase. The last sentence of Chase’s book is, “Why should Russians have all the fun remaking a world?” So you see the continuity.
There was a romance with the economy of scale, and not just in America. FDR’s advisers said that having so many different states and so many different ways of doing things was inefficient. If you had 50 flowers blooming, as federalists would have, they bloom differently and it makes for a messy garden. There was this sense that the economy couldn’t grow further unless there was rationalization, standardization. Even now you’ll see businessmen fighting for standardization: “Just make the rule!” they say.
The most important thing for our generation is that the New Deal will come back to bite our children when they pay yet higher payroll taxes because we did not dare to reform Social Security and other entitlements. There are not enough people to pay for Social Security, and Social Security is set up so that you can’t fix it just by growing the economy.
This is a moment of choice for us, our generation and the younger people. We have to look again at Roosevelt. Roosevelt was inspiring. He was right on World War II, but we do not have to have false nostalgia for his wrongheaded policies in the ‘30s. We should warn our children and help to change Social Security, but you don’t see that in the presidential candidates. You don’t see daring on Social Security.
Remembering ‘The Forgotten Man’
Amity Shlaes, author of a new history of the Great Depression, talks about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s baleful economic legacy, the growth of government, and the death of classical liberalism.
Nick Gillespie | January 2008
More here
http://www.reason.com/news/show/123476.html
I read the book and consider it revisionist history. I will leave you with one thought...most all conservatives agree that WWII ended the depression. Consider this, what was WWII but a giant spending and jobs program...making weapons and of course full employment via the military? Thus one could argue that Roosevelt did not spend enough to get the economy moving...it’s a possibility. I have studied economics in my time...I am no expert...let me throw that out there. But, I still believe the only way to deal with a deflationary cycle is spending. Now, I don’t think Pres. Obama has done a good job in spending wisely. We could have used all the money spent in far better ways. If you study the Hoover administration, you can see how pulling money out of the economy worsened the depression and lead to incredible misery. There is a reason Roosevelt was elected four times.
He should think about 70 years earlier.
ML/NJ
>>I read the book and consider it revisionist history. I will leave you with one thought...most all conservatives agree that WWII ended the depression. Consider this, what was WWII but a giant spending and jobs program...making weapons and of course full employment via the military? Thus one could argue that Roosevelt did not spend enough to get the economy moving...it’s a possibility. I have studied economics in my time...I am no expert...let me throw that out there. But, I still believe the only way to deal with a deflationary cycle is spending. Now, I don’t think Pres. Obama has done a good job in spending wisely. We could have used all the money spent in far better ways. If you study the Hoover administration, you can see how pulling money out of the economy worsened the depression and lead to incredible misery. There is a reason Roosevelt was elected four times.<<
I think it is the type of spending, building roads and power lines that matters, but a lot of the stimulus money has been used to pay off political favors for the left. Building things like Roads, Bridges, Power lines, Nuclear Power plants, and F22 fighters employ a lot more people than paying money to useless members of ACORN. Plus building F22 fighters and Nuclear power plants expand the need for High Tech Workers as well. Does paying Acorn help a laid off Electrical Systems Engineer?
I would be less critical of Obama if he actually spent the money a little more wiser than he has so far. But instead it has been nothing but a spend fest to pay for past and future political favors.
Exactly right...the money is being misspent.
bookmark
I’ve read this, and I found Burt Folsom’s “New Deal or Raw Deal?” better, shorter, and more to the point. But Forgotten Man is ok.
Agreed. I thought it was the better of the two books on the "New Deal". Some of the facts he gathered were damming. The Forgotten Man may be more relevant for todays cicumstances.
The response to Pearl Harbor was a massive amount of government spending, dwarfing what was done as a response to the Depression. Unless you’re making a case for government spending pulling the economy out of the depression it’s not a useful thing to cite.
I tend to agree with you. Government’s percentage of GDP during the New Deal was below 10%. Post WWII it has always been around 20%. During WWII it rose as high as 40%, and maybe spiked higher. To argue that WWII pulled the US out of depression is to make the case that FDR’s New Deal spending was far too small. A depression is a collapse of demand, and different from a normal recession which is largely self-correcting.
Or looked at another way, government taxes some groups in order to redistribute wealth forcibly to other groups. Is this a practice Microsoft can engage in? What about Apple? How about Hewlitt Packard? General Mills? No? Then the taxing-and-subsidizing that government practices is not something that "competes" with the private sector. It's a form of cheating, not competing, and it's important to understand the difference between private action and governmental action.
Try the American Heritage Dictionary if you're not making any headway with Webster's.
Makes no difference what government spends our money on as far as trying to "stimulate" the economy goes: all government spending is consumption spending -- the consuming of capital -- and not productive spending. Every dollar government spends on "infrastructure" is a dollar taken from someone in the private sector...a dollar that was either going to be spent on a consumption good in the private sector, or a dollar that was going to be put in a savings account and lent out to businesses. That dollar was either going to stimulate the market for consumption goods or stimulate the market for capital goods. When government forces that dollar out of the hand of the private earner and spends it on something that it considers necessary -- paying off ACORN, subsidizing AMTRAK, or building nuclear power plants--there is obviously no net gain to the economy: the wealth you claim to have produced in the public sector is exactly equaled by the wealth that has been subtracted in the private sector.
As far as government spending is concerned, there is only "spending you happen to like" vs. "spending you happen not to like." With the obvious exception of defense, there is no such thing as government "spending wisely." The "wisest" thing government could do would be to leave the wealth in the hands of the people who created it.
Building things like Roads, Bridges, Power lines, Nuclear Power plants, and F22 fighters employ a lot more people than paying money to useless members of ACORN.
Ah, so you're not really interested in productivity and wealth creation at all; you'll support government spending as long as it employs as many people as possible! No problem: have government subsidize an employment program requiring workers to dig a ditch and then fill it back up again. Don't give them modern machinery to do this with -- remember, modern machinery causes unemployment -- but instead give each worker a teaspoon.
I predict that we can quickly reach full employment in this country if we "spend wisely" on a government program to hire lots of people to dig ditches with teaspoons and then fill them back up again. And -- here's the NICE part -- the subsidies you pay these workers will be spent! They will pay for their rent, their food, etc., and those who receive this money will, in turn, spend it, thus creating an ever widening circle of prosperity! THIS IS WONDERFUL! HURRAY FOR GOVERNMENT SPENDING! And if this happened not to have been the result in economies that practiced precisely that sort of thing -- Cuba, North Korea, former Soviet Union, communist China -- it must be because the government taxers-and-spenders are "unwise". If only they were more like you -- wise -- and spent the Forgotten Man's dollar on "X" instead of on "Y", things would have turned out very differently.
Good points,all. It is becoming very difficult to differentiate private and government actions because there is a great deal of corruption at all levels. So I would say, it is a matter of semantics and thanks for the tip on Am Heritage. And thanks for the debate. It always helps to clarify things to be more effective in truth distribution.
The difference between the depression and after Pearl Harbor is where the money was spent. The difference between CCC and manufacturing aircraft, tanks, and ships.
Exactly, I agree with you. This recession is unlike any other in my memory and very much like the depression...now the spending-trillions- will not help because it was not targeted properly...very nervous about this.
There is no difference...spending is spending...one could argue dams and roads are useful after the war while tanks maybe not so much; however, even that is incorrect, it is putting the money into the economy that is stimulative...you could have dumped all the war goods into the ocean and it still would have saved the economy. Thus those like the author of Forgotten Man who argue that the war ended the depression are actually endorsing big spending...much bigger then the current spending. I still maintain this book is revisionist history...for example she sites employment statistics that do not include CCC or WPA figures...making unemployment look worse than it was to bolster her argument; by the way important projects like dams and roads still used to day were built by the WWW and CCC so it is incorrect to categorize these programs as you have...but even using her figures, unemployment went down from 25% to about 10%-I call that significant...Roosevelt took money out of the economy in 36 thus causing a new ‘recession’ which caused unemployment to rise in 37. In order to finally shake the depression, there is no doubt it was spending that did it. How could the author miss this?
Also, why is building weapons more stimulative than in building other products or even roads? There is no inherent value in this production that makes it better than building widgets.
The size of the government expenditure was more significant than how it was spent. 5% of GDP versus 40%. During WWII fully one tenth of the US population drew a government paycheck as uniformed military. And that doesn’t count the large number of civilian government employees. The country went from 25% unemployment to full employment.
In a sense the CCC construction projects turned out to be more of a capital investment than the war materiel churned out in the 40s. Many of the CCC projects lasted 50 years, some still exist. War materiel was to great extent pure consumption. Only a fraction of it had a useful life after the war. What it did do is give a tremendous jump start to a greatly underutilized workforce.
Massive spending didn’t seem to help Japan pull out of its ‘depression’, a depression whose origin appears to have some similarities to our current crisis. So I’d say there is good reason to be nervous. Trillions are being thrown at the economy, but I suspect that many times that amount is disappearing as loans and their derivatives default.
Good excerpt. The 1930s electorate was stable so redeemable. This crisis brings us an electorate that is changing due to immigration legal and illegal. Immigrants vote Democrat it is as simple as that.
During Roosevelt we deported people. Roosevelt drove many Mexicans out. We have the opposite this time
I would like your opinion of another article that I have posted a link several times by Wayne Jett (was a college of Jude Wanniski- now deceased). I found it revealing on Mercantilism.
It was recently posted on a blog in TN that I admire.
The Article discusses the impact of Keynesian Mercantilism on the “Middle Class” in the U.S.
Best regards,
Texas Fossil
I read that Jett link and that’s how I think. We need prosecutions of Wall Street and AIG fraudsters. So far I see nothing. Go to Karl Denninger’s site he talks that way every day
http://market-ticker.denninger.net/
Agreed. The way I should have said what I said earlier is, the difference between CCC and building a manufacturing base.
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