Posted on 09/23/2014 9:49:15 AM PDT by iowamark
My seventh-grade son recently wrote a U.S. History paper extolling the virtues of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. “It ended the Great Depression,” he wrote with great certainty. He’s only 12 and parroting what the history texts and his teachers told him.
That’s his excuse. What’s Ken Burns’?
Mr. Burns’ docudrama on the Roosevelts — for those who weren’t bored to tears — repeats nearly all the worn-out fairy tales of the FDR presidency, including what I call the most enduring myth of the 20th century, which is that FDR’s avalanche of alphabet-soup government programs ended the Great Depression. Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on such lies?
Ask nearly anyone over the age of 80, and they will say that FDR cared about the working man and “gave the country hope,” a point that Mr. Burns emphasizes. Roosevelt exuded empathy, which isn’t a bad thing — remember Bill Clinton’s memorable line “I feel your pain”? — but caring doesn’t create jobs or lift gross domestic product.
Nor does spending government money revive growth, despite the theories put into practice by the then-dean of all economists, John Maynard Keynes. Any objective analysis of these facts can lead to no other conclusion. U.S. unemployment averaged a rate of 18 percent during Roosevelt’s first eight years in office. In the decade of the 1930s, U.S. industrial production and national income fell by about almost one-third. In 1940, after year eight years of the New Deal, unemployment was still averaged a god-awful 14 percent...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
um.. FDR’s policies never end, and indeed have only been expanded upon over the decades.
exactly and neither did the war.
Some of them were thrown out by the Supreme Court and some ended with his or sooner after his death.
Remember he had appointed “dictators” to control industries and make sure that no real competition occurred.
Then from 1933 to 1935 he had the National Recovery Administration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Recovery_Administration
A real fascist piece of work that was.
Also the WPA and CCC and such
While our economy keep getting worse and worse because of FDR's policies.
But no one remembers or knows that.
All they remember is that FDR gave them a job moving rocks from one spot to another (which he would later designate parks) and paid them just enough to buy a loaf of bread.
Pretty nice trick. Take everything away from people, and then give them back just enough to afford some bread and watch as they idolize you!
My wife and I were watching the miniseries. She asked me if i liked FDR. Seeing how he died 15 years before I was born, I told her I never had a chance to meet him.
Upon further reflection, I told her to watch the show and see if he sounded like a communist or capitalist.
About an hour later she said, “I see what you mean. Wow, I never knew he did that stuff.”
What the “elite” like to think of a progressive, an objective viewer sees at socialist.
Yeah, no kidding. Couldn't get through 1/2 hour before I fell asleep.
My Inlaws worshipped FDR and JFK.
My parents, and their parents, thought FDR was a socialist commie.
Guess which side of the family made the guns for Smith and Wesson, and which side was a VP for Smith and Wesson?
I am at the 3rd episode *(yet to watch) this latest Ken Burns doc..
I do notice that he gets every possible dig into the republicans in congress, that he can... as a group...and in particular in the 1st 2 episodes about Prez Teddy Roosevelt. it’s been riveting entertainment, but I have to hold my tongue at times .. I end up shouting at the television quite a bit.. I haven’t seen one example of him citing the democrats in congress as blocking a particular piece of legislation.
His poll numbers were lower because he wasn't curing economic woes (he was in fact purposely extending them to achieve more Gov't power).
Obama is following FDR's pattern. He is prolonging these economic doldrums so he can gain more power to the Fed Gov't. The Obama EO's are intended to achieve that.
I said as much in an economics class when I was in junior high school and the teacher ridiculed me. Mr. Elmies was his name. Total jackass.
I’m sure my MIL would approve of FDR. I avoid the subjects because I have enough trouble.
My (immediate) family is a bit different. Hers would’ve made the guns and that goes along with the union entitlement mentality egged on by FDR etc.
I did a paper on the Bonus Army for an American History class in college, complete with some pretty disgusting photographs. Having taken a number of U.S. History classes in both elementary and high school, I was amazed that I’d never heard of this event before. I pretty much lost any respect I ever had for Gen. MacArthur.
I graduated from H.S. in 1964 so this selective teaching of our nation’s history, particularly its warts, goes back some years. Mr. Burns certainly isn’t helping much.
The Whiskey Rebellion soured you on George Washington too??
If Burns didn’t have that old plagiarist Doris Kearns-Goodwin to repeat her borrowed “history”, Burns would never be able to do minute of video.
Ration cards were an artifact of the war, not the Depression.
And yet people still lionize ivory chair government lackeys like Keynes. Or try to say he was misunderstood. No he was a big government elitist.
At least when I went to school I was taught that no one really knows what ended the Depression - but it is likely the New Deal had no effect. The truth would be the New Deal made things worse.
Excuse me?
Indeed, the implications of laying credit to the war has wide implications. It throws Austrian theory (and common sense) out the window. How is diverting productive capacity to things that don’t increase wealth and in fact destroy real wealth create a better economy?
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