Posted on 10/29/2003 6:40:41 AM PST by presidio9
Edited on 04/22/2004 11:50:13 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Those worried about the recent sluggishness of the American economy should look to the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt. When he entered office in 1933, unemployment was at 33%, there was almost no public-sector relief for the jobless, 45% of family homes had been -- or were in imminent danger of being -- foreclosed, and the Chicago Grain Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange and the banking system had collapsed. Almost no one was engaged in agriculture on an economically sustainable basis and the nation's food supply was apt to be severely interrupted at any time.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
That's a loaded question, because it presents the result without examining the process that was needed to reach it. Curing cancer would be a good thing, too. But if curing cancer requires us to do massive medical experiments on the population and in the process kill several million people who had no cancer to begin with, I would contend that the "cost" of the process far outweighed the "benefit" of the result.
Was a civil war the most effective means of ending slavery in the United States? I'm not taking a position one way or another -- I simply present it to illustrate that sometimes things aren't as clearly obvious as they might seem.
Total BS. You were sanctimonious and I called you on it. After the fact you tried to act like you were joking because you realized how ridiculous it is to inject ficticous portrayals as fact. But that's just you. You can't help yourself.
Abolishing slavery was a good thing; using violence to achieve an end is always worse; that's how us Christians were raised anyway.
...so then it follows that the the war in Iraq was a bad thing, right? Geeze, you just can't stay out of your own way. This is why I treat your posts with the respect that they deserve: NONE.
The fact is the Civil War happened. 300,000 died trying to free millions. 300,000 died trying to keep them in chains. The result is they are free. That's a good thing.
Like all utopian schemes, it was sort of doomed from the outset, I think.
If our recovery--as poor as it was under Roosevelt--was in fact better than those in some other lands; so too was the previous prosperity of America, as well as the post World War II (and post Roosevelt) recovery of America. Roosevelt does not deserve credit for a self-reliant population--or the fruits of having such a population. Quite the contrary, he did everything he could to make them less self-reliant.
All in all, a "whitewash," pure and simple.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Today, there are millions of Christians in the Sudan who are enslaved by their Muslim enemies.
1. Would it be worth "spending" 300,000 lives to free them?
2. Would it be worth "spending" 1 life to free them?
3. Would it be worth "spending" 1 life to free them if that one life were yours?
My guess is that your answers to these questions depend entirely upon how close these lives are to your own. It's easy to think in terms of abstractions by illustrating how many lives were lost in a "noble" effort to achieve a "positive" result and end slavery 140 years ago, but I am quite certain of one thing: If there were millions of blacks enslaved in Confederate states today, and the Union went to war to free those slaves, you and I wouldn't be found within a hundred miles of a Union Army recruiting office.
The American Civil War was communism's first major defeat. If the world had drawn the proper conclusions, we might have been spared a great deal of needless suffering in the twentieth century.
No question about that.
I would argue, though, that the seeds of centralization were planted long before when President Washington sided with Hamilton in his argument with Jefferson about the propriety of a national bank. Chief Justice Marshall then reiterated the same arguments.
Since then, the United States government has grown more or less as fast as Congress has wished. The Civil War just provided Congress with another dragon to slay and another reason for rapid growth.
I'm not so sure that the long-term results are going to be positive, though.
In the last analysis, we the people have to decide how big a government we want. If we ever really want to, we can reduce the size of the federal government.
Black is right that FDR kept ideas of freedom and parliamentary self-government alive in a world where more radical and totalitarian ideas had more appeal. Arguably his international significance is greater than his importance to the US. Maybe we could have muddled through the Depression, but other countries needed an example that bad economic times need not lead to dictatorship. Then again, the Depression hit hardest here and in Germany, so we might well have succombed to tyranny as Germany did.
But Black is wrong in contrasting FDR with the appeasers who ran the rest of the Western world. FDR showed how much of an appeaser he really was in his dealings with Stalin. If some could believe Roosevelt was different from Chamberlain and Daladier, it's because the US wasn't involved in Munich and other European affairs. Had we been, there's no reason to think FDR's response would have been different from Chamberlain's. Appeasment was a common response, because the public didn't want another war. In the thirties the question was whether appeasement was to be a means of deferring the inevitable war until the Western powers had the weapons to win it, or whether the free world would delude ourselves into thinking that it could win Hitler over and permanently prevent war.
It's a mistake to assume that most people in the Thirties thought as we do now about capitalism and the alternatives. Roosevelt had to function at a time when very many people assumed that free markets had failed. So it's natural that he would have moved in a more statist direction. What hurts FDR's reputation today is that he came to regard his policies not as temporary expedients but as more permanent constructions. If he'd kept it mind that Americans couldn't retain their liberties if they had to permanently rely on the government for employment and fork over the lion's share of such money as they did earn to the tax man, we might think better of him today.
The idea of the "great President" is something we might want to rethink. A "great President" is someone who sees the country through a great crisis. He doesn't have to be someone that we'd agree with or find universally admirable. It's enough if he is able to preserve something essential at a time when it's threatened. But we don't need to seek such leaders in ordinary times and should count ourselves lucky if we can get by without them.
I have a slightly different take. In the Constitution, Article I Section 8 limits the powers and duties of the federal government only to those explicitly listed. Adding to the list is defined to be beyond the reach of we the people, by way of Congress, except by Amendments.
There are scores of things that the USA federal government sticks its nose into which cannot be justified in Article I Section 8.
My point is that the country wasn't designed to be so flexible to the whim of the people who might want the government to do this or that.
If USA still adhered to the original intent of Article I Section 8, sure there would be increase or decrease in size of federal government, but on a vastly smaller scale than now. But because A1S8 has been blown out of the water, the problem has, contrary to design, fallen to the people to shrink the federal government (or grow it bigger).
The problem now is FDR opened Pandora's box. The federal coffers have been thrown open to the whim of the people. Since there are no limits on what the federal government can do, politicians buy votes all day long. This has affected the dynamics of democracy to say the least. It is very difficult, probably impossible, to put the genie back in the bottle (to mix metaphors).
What did you call me on? You started claiming to different people on yesterdays thread and today that my only source was a movie. I called you out on your gutless lying.
Well, that's the one thing everybody agrees about. A big dispute is (more correctly, was) over the best way to interpret the meaning of the "necessary and proper" clause.
I don't pay much attention to what Marx said. I think it would be a mistake for me to let him call my shots for me. ;-)
Let's see. VA first voted against secession, then changed her vote after SC attacked Sumter. She then had troops on the road to attack the federal arsenals at Harper's Ferry and Hamptom Roads before the vote to secede passed. In response to these sneak attacks, the federal forces placed artillery across the Potomac to protect Washington against another surprise attack, which a great many people in the South, including Jackson, were advocating. At this point, Washington was for all practical purposes under siege.
Just exactly where in this timeline do you believe Lincoln behaved appropriately?
BTW, I'm working off the top of my head here, so sequence could be a little off.
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