Free Republic

President-elect Barack Obama added sweep and meat to his economic agenda on Saturday, pledging the largest new investment in roads and bridges since President Dwight D. Eisenhower built the Interstate system in the late 1950s, and tying his key initiatives – education, energy, health care –back to jobs in a package that has the makings of a smaller and modern version of FDR's New Deal marriage of job creation with infrastructure upgrades.  The president-elect also said for the first time that he will “launch the most sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings that this country has ever seen.”...

New Book Probes Lies Against America by: Jesse Masai, December 04, 2008 A lie here, a lie there, and yet some other lie elsewhere. Now, though, author Michael Medved has put them all together in a ten-point summary in his new book, The ten big lies about America: Combating destructive distortions about our nation. Launching the book at a recent event at the Heritage Foundation, Medved elected to whet his audience’s appetite with three examples. “In one of the lies, it has been suggested to us that the solution to the economic down-turn is aggressive government programs. It is amazing...

Ever since Decision 2008 wrapped up, the media have spewed a bunch of bilge about how during the Great Depression President Franklin Roosevelt saved the U.S. economy with gobs of government “stimulus,” aka "central Planning." Imagine a movie script that told the true story of how FDR’s New Deal didn’t put an end to the Depression but instead actually prolonged the pain of the worst economy in American history.

WASHINGTON -- Early in what became the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes was asked if anything similar had ever happened. "Yes," he replied, "it was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years." It did take 25 years, until November 1954, for the Dow to return to the peak it reached in September 1929. So caution is sensible concerning calls for a new New Deal. The assumption is that the New Deal vanquished the Depression. Intelligent, informed people differ about why the Depression lasted so... --snip-- In "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression," Amity Shlaes...

Working on the day after Thanksgiving, Brian Williams used Friday's NBC Nightly News to promote a new book from FDR's grandson, providing Williams with an opportunity to propose: “In your estimation, could we use a little FDR right about now?” Though Franklin Delano Roosevelt's policies failed to end the Depression, Williams hailed him as “the man who led this nation out of financial disaster.” Conceding “we can no longer talk to him,” as if we'd benefit from doing so, Williams trumpeted how “tonight we think we have about the next best thing” in FDR's grandson, Curtis, who “lives in the...

Human history is difficult. As most people realize, there are various perspectives and opinions regarding what has exactly happened in the past. Who do you believe? How do we know that the historian is biased? The same problem faces us up close in regards to the daily news. There is already a strong awareness that the news of today is written without reference to the truth, but only in reference to the particular viewpoint of the writer and/or the company/government who employs that writer. Facts are left out. Other facts are exaggerated. Stories are created and skewed in order to...

WAS THE NEW DEAL A BUST? Burton Folsom certainly thinks so. A professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan and senior historian at the Foundation for Economic Education, he claims Franklin D. Roosevelt's programs didn't help end the Great Depression. Worse, he insists income redistribution and regulation by the federal government -- the legacies of the New Deal -- are an albatross for the economy. It's an intriguing theory, especially coming as Barack Obama prepares his New New Deal. But Folsom is unconvincing; he is an invisible-hand ideologue, not an economist. He relies heavily on the fact -- acknowledged...

Paul Krugman of the New York Times has been on the attack lately in regard to the New Deal. His new book "The Return of Depression Economics," emphasizes the importance of New Deal-style spending. He has said the trouble with the New Deal was that it didn't spend enough. He's also arguing that some writers and economists have been misrepresenting the 1930s to make the effect of FDR's overall policy look worse than it was. I'm interested in part because Mr. Krugman has mentioned me by name. He recently said that I am the one "whose misleading statistics have been...

To really examine FDR's economic record it would take much more space than merely a blog post, however a full examination of his economic record is critical now. That's because many pundits are pushing President Elect Obama to create a New, New Deal. Those pushing Obama in such a direction work under the assumption that FDR's New Deal was a shining beacon of success. FDR has properly been lionized as a President however with this lionization there comes a rather rose colored glasses look at his entire Presidency. In my opinion, FDR deserves a special place in our pantheon of...

FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great DepressionBy Jim Powell What the Critics Say: " Very readable, factual, and insightful - and endorsed by two Nobel Prize-winning economists." (Thomas Sowell, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University)Think FDR was a great president? Think again. In the minds of historians and the American public alike, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of our greatest presidents, not least because he supposedly saved America from the Great Depression. But as historian Jim Powell reveals in this groundbreaking book, Roosevelt's New Deal policies actually prolonged and exacerbated the economic disaster, swelled the...

It is a very good thing that tall tales enjoy a special place in American culture because through their bigger-than-life characters, those simple yarns aspire to the profound purpose of great literature: to tell the truth about human experience. Think of it. Whether recounting the life of a Molly Pitcher, Paul Bunyan, John Henry, or Johnny Appleseed, American tall tales remind us that no idea is thought, no war won, no land plowed, no steel made, no charity given, no dream achieved, and no good life built except through the intellect, imagination, conscience, blood, sweat, and tears of individual human...

There was an article in the Washington Post yesterday talking about Obama's plan to tackle rising unemployment. An odd sub-headline stuck out like a sore thumb: "Plan Aims to Create or Save 2.5 Million Positions by 2011." I get the create part, but saving a job sounds like a liberal weasel-word for patting yourself on the back for the status quo. So for example, if I don't fire any of my employees and Obama enacts his proposals, whatever they are, has he saved a job? More . . .

[T]he truth [about the Great Depression] is that Roosevelt changed course from year to year, trying a mix of policies, some good and some bad. ... Roosevelt instituted a disastrous legacy of agricultural subsidies and sought to cartelize industry, backed by force of law. Neither policy helped the economy recover. He also took steps to strengthen unions and to keep real wages high. This helped workers who had jobs, but made it much harder for the unemployed to get back to work. One result was unemployment rates that remained high throughout the New Deal period. Today, President-elect Barack Obama faces...

It’s almost enough to make you wonder whether the cause of individual liberty is lost. Shortly after the financial crisis hit, Jacob Weisberg, editor in chief of the online magazine Slate, wrote an article with the headline “Libertarianism is dead.” The burden of the piece was that, since deregulation and untrammeled free markets have been so thoroughly discredited by this crisis, libertarians should just crawl in their holes and never be heard from again. And the attitude that this crisis means what we really need is more regulation and a retreat from the “theology” of free markets was heard on...

His friends advise Barack Obama to launch a "New" New Deal. Maybe that's because the old New Deal is sinking fast. Mr. Obama's one deeply false note during the campaign was his harping on "deregulation" as if that were the source of current troubles. His real problem is the crack-up of the world FDR built. Fannie Mae was a New Deal creation, subsidizing the securitization of mortgage debt. FDR's successors piled on the subsidies for housing debt and incentives directed at low-income borrowers. Kaboom. Then there's the UAW, born in 1935. For decades the UAW steadily traded away domestic auto...

One of the great mysteries of life is the prevalence, in our own country, of so many hate-America types. This week I've discussed their power and presence in our colleges and universities and how they indoctrinate and teach their students through lectures and writings how to hate America. I must admit that when someone hates America, the greatest democracy in the history of the world, which has produced virtually unlimited opportunity for all, I can't explain it. When you encounter such an irrational force, there seems to be no rational explanation. So some of the most powerful observers of the...

The last couple weeks may well be a harbinger of things to come, as the people Obama promised to tax heavily continue to pull out of the market. On November 4, the Dow closed at 9,625; today, it was at 8,497. That means that the market has lost nearly 12% of its value since Obama became President-elect. Hardly a measure of confidence. The market spoke rather clearly on November 5: NEW YORK, Nov 5 (Reuters) - Wall Street hardly delivered a rousing welcome to President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday, dropping by the largest margin on record for a day following...

The death and rebirth of American liberalism both began with flags in Grant Park. On Aug. 28, 1968, 10,000 people gathered there to protest the Democratic Convention taking place a few blocks away, which was about to nominate Lyndon Johnson's Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, thus implicitly ratifying the hated Vietnam War. Chicago mayor Richard Daley had warned the protesters not to disrupt his city and denied them permits to assemble, but they came anyway. All afternoon, the protesters chanted and the police hovered, until about 3:30, when someone climbed a flagpole and began lowering the American flag...

The historical model that the Democrats are choosing to hold up as they ponder our financial crisis isn't Harry Truman's Fair Deal or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. It is Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. At least three economic reforms under discussion now were also central in the New Deal package. Trouble is, these reforms didn't necessarily work well when they were first tried - and some failed outright. Consider, for starters, a stimulus package. President-elect Obama has said that "the one thing I can say with certainty is that we are going to need a stimulus package passed either before...

In 1932, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president as the nation was heading into a severe recession. The world's economy was slowing down, and all economic indicators in the U.S. showed signs of trouble. The new president's response was to restructure the economy with the New Deal -- an expansion of the role of government once unimaginable in America. We now know that FDR's policies likely prolonged the Great Depression because the economy never fully recovered in the 1930s, and actually got worse in the latter half of the decade. And we know that FDR got away with it...

God bless those Democrats. They're so nostalgic. This is not a new Great Depression, but if we all try hard enough, we can make it one! They long to take us back to yesteryear, when financial collapse ushered in an era of solidarity and equality. We were all in this together. All together in the crapper, but we were all together. Ah, what a time it was: Hobos huddled around open fires down at the rail yard, bankers were jumping out of windows, and we spent more time at home with family because we had no money to feed our...

Review: The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes By Lil Tuttle What happens if government intervenes in a nation’s economic crisis and makes it worse? Amity Shlaes tells such a story in her book, The Forgotten Man: a New History of the Great Depression (HarperCollins). School children are generally taught this standard history lesson about the Great Depression: The 1920s was a period of false growth, high living and low morals brought to a halt by the 1929 stock market crash. The crash led to crippling inflation and the nation’s economic collapse. President Franklin D. Roosevelt took control and ushered...

The stock market has not run into problems because the government hasn't done enough to support the financial system. It has fallen off a cliff because monetary and fiscal authorities are doing the wrong things. America's two most powerful economic officials, both unelected, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, embrace a 21st - century "New Deal," when our problems cry out for economic Darwinism. The Paulson - Bernanke prescriptions are the problem and the stock market knows it.

With visions of a massive liberal majority in the next Congress and the power to remake economic policy for the next generation, Democrats are dusting off their New Deal history books and openly discussing the idea of re-engineering Depression-era agencies for the 21st century. Several lawmakers want to bring back the Home Ownership Loan Corp., and others have discussed resurrecting the defunct Reconstruction Finance Corp., a federal program that made direct loans to businesses. Others see a lame-duck stimulus bill less as a short-term cash infusion for the economy and more as a long-term, government-driven jobs creator — a kind...

wo UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years. "Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10-...

President Bush will speak in a few minutes. Get to a TV and watch it, if you have the stomach for it.

What we really need is a new New Deal: a systematic approach to the financial and economic problems of the U.S. Firstly, we need relief for ordinary Americans. At the moment, four million households are behind on their mortgage payments and facing foreclosure. Some estimates suggest that an additional two million may face eviction next year.

America Needs A New New Deal By KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL and ERIC SCHLOSSER The Bush administration has proposed the most expensive government spending plan in American history, allocating as much as $700 billion to a Wall Street bailout. The proposal was attacked by members of both parties, who immediately began negotiations to find an alternative. The Bush plan was not only a political blunder; it was also a complete repudiation of the administration's own economic policies. It could not be justified by any of the core beliefs governing free enterprise and the free market. As with the decision to invade...

This year marks the 75th anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the Emergency Conservation Act, which created the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps] and changed the lives of up to 4 million young men while reinvigorating a struggling nation. Events are being held across the country to pay tribute to the CCC's work from 1933 to 1942. [ ... ] Most the CCC boys, as they're still called, were 18 to 25 years old when they enlisted. To be eligible for the program, they had to be identified by the U.S. Labor Department as being on the "relief rolls," unemployed, physically...

June 20, 2008, 0:00 p.m. What’s the Frequency?New Deal narcissism and what FDR wrought. An NRO Q&A The New Deal celebrates its 75th anniversary this week. National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez checked in with New York Times bestselling author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, Amity Shlaes, to mark the occasion. Kathryn Jean Lopez: How are you celebrating the New Deal’s 75th? Amity Shlaes: I’m participating in the Roosevelt Reading Festival at Hyde Park Saturday! One of the people I will see there is Nick Taylor, author of his own book, American Made,...

Presidential Personality Cult Deconstructed by: Malcolm A. Kline, April 25, 2008 So many generations have been taught that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ended the Depression that it has become an article of faith for historians in and out of academia and, naturally, their media acolytes. “The life of Franklin Roosevelt has been well-analyzed through the lens of politics and policy,” the editors of U. S. News & World Report write in the April 28/May 5 issue of the magazine. “As the president who lifted the country out of economic despair and stood up to foreign military aggression, FDR offers historians...

Progressive Calls for Civics Education by: Bethany Stotts, April 11, 2008 Contrary to the assumption that curriculum reform is promoted by only by conservatives, a member of the progressive movement recently lamented that students were losing touch with their American heritage. “We need to care, the Progressive Movement needs to care that the fabric of civics education in our country essentially has been decimated,” said Andrea Batista Schlesinger at a recent conference on the New Deal. However, Schlesinger warned the audience to not tell anyone what she said, lest she be accused of being a neoconservative. “And this where I...

The Great Depression... hit in waves, making everyone feel helpless. First came the crash of the stock market, then the failure of the local banks, then the failure of larger ones, then joblessness, and more joblessness, and hunger. By the time the country elected Franklin Roosevelt on his New Deal platform in 1932, one in four was unemployed.... Overly efficient factories, [economists] said, were producing too many goods for a market that could not keep up. Factories therefore had to lay off workers. It all amounted to "vicious industrial Darwinism," as Nick Taylor terms it in "American-Made: The Enduring Legacy...

New Deal Expansions Explored by: Bethany Stotts, March 28, 2008 Professor Patrick Garry’s recently published An Entrenched Legacy blames the increasing level of judicial activism on the precedents established under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. As Accuracy in Academia previously reported, FDR’s economic policies had a harmful effect on poor African-Americans, lowering their status within the public sector and inflating African-American unemployment when compared to their white counterparts. Professor Garry’s thesis expands this criticism of the New Deal to condemn FDR’s court-packing scheme, which, he argues, influenced the Supreme Court to focus on individual rights protections instead of promoting overall...

Racially Stacked New Deal by: Malcolm A. Kline, February 28, 2008 Although academics routinely credit President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with ending the Great Depression, winning World War II and saving western civilization, the actual historical record does not augur in favor of any of these assertions. ... For one thing, Archie never used the N-word that Mr. Fireside Chat was all too comfortable with. Bruce Bartlett shows this side of the four-term president in his book Wrong On Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past. To be fair, unlike his mentor Woodrow Wilson, FDR did not act on these inclinations, although...

Alter's readers would never suspect that [FDR] scores as badly if not worse on the typical kinds of charges hurled against George W. Bush and his administration: militarism, ideological cabals, secrecy, lies and lying-us-into-war, unscrupulous punishment of political enemies, disrespect for the Constitution and our political traditions, run-amok Wilsonianism, special favors for Big Business, and, most of all, incompetence. As historian William Leuchtenburg documented in his essay "The New Deal as Moral Analogue to War," Roosevelt's presidency was drenched in martial metaphors and militaristic appeals to loyalty and unity long before World War II. The New Deal's Public Works Administration...

Moody's Investors Service voices concerns about the long-term creditworthiness of federal securities, citing exploding health care and Social Security obligations; Senator Clinton proposes a stimulus package that would expand entitlements to low-income Americans; Citigroup has to go abroad to find capital to cover losses that arose because of improper risk management: All these things are linked. Mrs. Clinton's program fundamentally misses the underlying dilemma. Our short-term economic difficulties are the result of bad private risk management of financial portfolios; our longer-term predicaments are bad risk management of federal entitlement programs. Unduly risky portfolios of private investments have been funded; enormous...

Although Senator Clinton evidently wants to impress everybody with her undisciplined creativity concerning how to spend our tax dollars, she is actually ignoring her oath to defend the Constitution. This is because she is ignoring that the federal government doesn't have the constitutional power to decide new ways to spend taxpayer's money in the first place. She is irresponsibly carrying on the unconstitutional federal spending policies of FDR. More specifically, FDR essentially talked the Supreme Court into ignoring the 10th A. protected power of the states and broadening the interpretation of the vaguely worded general welfare clause. He did do...

On May 7, 1933, just two months after the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New York Times reporter Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote that the atmosphere in Washington was “strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts, of Moscow at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan.…America today literally asks for orders.” The Roosevelt administration, she added, “envisages a federation of industry, labor and government after the fashion of the corporative State as it exists in Italy.” That article isn’t quoted in Three New Deals, a fascinating study by the German cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch....

A stranger stood at the gate of Hell And the Devil himself had answered the bell He looked him over from head to toe And said “My friend, I’d like to know What you have done in the line of sin To entitle you to come within?” Then Franklin D. with his usual guile Stepped forth and flashed his toothy smile. “When I took over in ’33, A nation’s faith was mine”, said he “I promised this and I promised that, And I calmed them down with a fireside chat. I spent their money on fishing trips And I fished...

THE ARGUMENT Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics. By Matt Bai. 316 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95. With the possible exception of the Republicans, is there a major political party more stupefyingly brain-dead than the Democrats? That’s the ultimate takeaway from “The Argument,” Matt Bai’s sharply written, exhaustively reported and thoroughly depressing account of “billionaires, bloggers, and the battle to remake Democratic politics” along unabashedly “progressive” (read: New Deal and Great Society) lines. Well-financed and influential groups ranging from the Democracy Alliance to the New Democrat Network to MoveOn.org may be taking over the Democratic Party,...

His name was Louis McHenry Howe, and he was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Karl Rove. Running through the various intemperate and seething remarks from liberal outposts at the departure of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove was a common theme. Rove, spluttered the Washington Post, was guilty of "working the anger points…that deepened the country's polarization…" My, my. Return with me now to those transformative days of the 1930s as the Democratic Party and the fortunes of Franklin D. Roosevelt were on the rise. For 72 years, Democrats had not fared well in elections against Abraham Lincoln and his...

The late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was a true liberal--a man who welcomed debate. Just before he died this winter, he wrote, quoting someone else, that history is an argument without end. That, Schlesinger added, "is why we love it so." Yet concerning Schlesinger's own period of study, the 1930s, there has been curiously little argument. The American consensus is Schlesinger's consensus: that FDR saved democracy from fascism by co-opting the left and far right with his alphabet programs. Certainly, an observer might criticize various aspects of the period, but scrutiny of the New Deal edifice in its entirety is something...

If you have any doubts government-mandated minimum-wage laws kill jobs for the poor rather than lift them out of poverty, just take a look at what is happening right now in American Samoa. The latest minimum-wage law passed by Congress calls specifically for hikes in the U.S. territory – 50 cents a year annually until the continental rate of $7.25 is reached. This Washington-knows-best, one-size-fits-all approach is killing jobs in Samoa already – just days after it was signed into law by President Bush last Friday. StarKist had planned to expand its tuna production next month by hiring some 200-300...

March 2007 “Roosevelt’s or Reagan’s America? A Time for Choosing” John Marini University of Nevada, Reno John Marini, a professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno, is a graduate of San Jose State University and earned his Ph.D. in government at the Claremont Graduate School. He has also taught at Agnes Scott College, Ohio University and the University of Dallas. He is on the board of directors of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy and a member of the Nevada Advisory Committee of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Dr. Marini is...

Until 1933, the U. S. dollar was the among the strongest and most stable currencies in the world. With the stroke of a pen, President Franklin Roosevelt torpedoed it. We are still plagued with the resulting inflation. All governments lust for taxpayers’ money. The ability to direct the expenditure of large sums of money confers great power upon political leaders. But the spending requirements that President Franklin Roosevelt had in mind upon taking office in 1933 were of extraordinary dimensions. Inflating the currency, in socialist theory, was a way to create more money for that end. In the 1920s, after...

If you look at my home page, you will see that I rank FDR third behind Lincoln and Washington, and ahead of Reagan and TR in my list of our greatest presidents. Now, someone took me to task for that choice on an unrelated thread, which led me to pen this piece that I now throw out there for your review and comments. In my younger, more brash days I would have dismissed FDR because of his socialist policies. And Yalta. And the supreme court-packing try. Sure, he had his faults, like all presidents. Yet he is - along with...

THE White House is expected to announce a reconstruction package for Iraq as part of a plan for a “surge” of up to 30,000 troops into Baghdad when President George W Bush unveils America’s new strategy next month.Bush is being urged to give up to $10 billion (£5.1 billion) to Iraq as part of a “New Deal” that would create work for unemployed Iraqis, following the model of President Franklin D Roosevelt during the 1930s depression. At the Pentagon, the joint chiefs of staff are insisting on reconstruction funds as part of a package of political and economic measures to...

Many people believe that government and business are warring factions, and that political parties typically align with one or the other. But the truth, as Timothy P. Carney points out in his new book, is that big business is often in bed with big government and that both Republicans and Democrats have helped forge a partnership that consistently rips off ordinary Americans. Carney's new book, The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money, exposes this nasty partnership in detail—from Boeing subsidies to Ethanol mandates—and shows just how taxpayers lose their money and their voice in Washington....

Nearly every accident investigated by forensic teams proves to have been caused by a series of seemingly small, individually survivable mistakes which, if left isolated to burn themselves out, would not have caused the actual conflagration. Military, law enforcement and business interests have learned, under the pain of great cost to themselves, to establish 'break points'- the clear cut fire lanes of operational safeguards- in the chains of events which lead to losses. Looking at these sequences of events, later, from the comfort of our Lazy Boy recliners, it is wrenching to realize that if only a few, (or sometimes...