Although freeing the slaves was a noble cause, Abe Lincoln is responsible for EVERY infringement by the federal government we suffer under today. I wouldn’t spend much time bragging about the man who single-handedly enlarged the scope of government more than any president in history. His actions paved the way for the New Deal, War on Poverty, War on Drugs, and every other usurpation of state sovereignty we’re trying to fight to this day. Your use of Abe may be a good political ploy, but on principal, Abe is the author of undoing our nation as intended by our forefathers.
Maybe your portrait will appear on a 2 cent piece since Lincoln’s on the 1 cent.
"Roosevelt was elected in part by the farm vote. They wanted the kind of high prices they had had before World War I. They had a significant drop in their prices, something on the order of 30 percent to 40 percent. Looking back, we might say that more of America should have moved to the city faster, which is what they did eventually anyhow."
He put Henry Wallace, a figure they knew, in as agriculture secretary. The administration made a bunch of rules. They put in a tax on middlemen, on the theory that that would help the farmers and that middlemen got in the way of efficiency rather than helped efficiency, which is what we think today.
Then there was an analogous beast in the business sphere called the National Industrial Recovery Act, which created the National Recovery Administration and which had a whole bunch of philosophies behind it, copying a little bit from Britain, copying definitely the German cartel system, and copying what Stalin was doing.
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.
http://reason.com/archives/2007/12/18/remembering-the-forgotten-man/2
Oh puleeze.