Posted on 08/30/2003 11:59:46 AM PDT by Cathryn Crawford
FDR's Raw Deal Exposed
August 30, 2003
BY THOMAS ROESER
For 70 years there has been a holy creed--spread by academia until accepted by media and most Americans--that Franklin D. Roosevelt cured the Great Depression. That belief spurred the growth of modern liberalism; conservatives are still on the defensive where modern historians are concerned.
Not so anymore when the facts are considered. Now a scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute has demonstrated that (a) not only did Roosevelt not end the Depression, but (b) by incompetent measures, he prolonged it. But FDR's myth has sold. Roosevelt, the master of the fireside chat, was powerful. His style has been equaled but not excelled.
Throughout the New Deal period, median unemployment was 17.2 percent. Joblessness never dipped below 14 percent, writes Jim Powell in a preview of his soon-to-be-published (by Crown Forum) FDR's Folly: How Franklin Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression. Powell argues that the major cause of the Depression was not stock market abuses but the Federal Reserve, which contracted the money supply by a third between 1929 and 1933. Then, the New Deal made it more expensive to hire people, adding to unemployment by concocting the National Industrial Recovery Act, which created some 700 cartels with codes mandating above-market wages. It made things worse, ''by doubling taxes, making it more expensive for employers to hire people, making it harder for entrepreneurs to raise capital, demonizing employers, destroying food . . . breaking up the strongest banks, forcing up the cost of living, channeling welfare away from the poorest people and enacting labor laws that hit poor African Americans especially hard,'' Powell writes.
Taxes spiraled (as a percentage of gross national product), jumping from 3.5 percent in 1933 to 6.9 percent in 1940. An undistributed profits tax was introduced. Securities laws made it harder for employers to raise capital. In ''an unprecedented crusade against big employers,'' the Justice Department hired 300 lawyers, who filed 150 antitrust lawsuits. Winning few prosecutions, the antitrust crusade not only flopped, but wracked an already reeling economy. At the same time, a retail price maintenance act allowed manufacturers to jack up retail prices of branded merchandise, which blocked chain stores from discounting prices, hitting consumers.
Roosevelt's central banking ''reform'' broke up the strongest banks, those engaged in commercial investment banking, ''because New Dealers imagined that securities underwriting was a factor in all bank failures,'' but didn't touch the cause of 90 percent of the bank failures: state and federal unit banking laws. Canada, which allowed nationwide branch banking, had not a single bank failure during the Depression. The New Deal Fed hiked banks' reserve requirement by 50 percent in July 1936, then increased it another 33.3 percent. This ''triggered a contraction of the money supply, which was one of the most important factors bringing on the Depression of 1938--the third most severe since World War I. Real GNP declined 18 percent and industrial production was down 32 percent.''
Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration hit the little guy worst of all, Powell writes. In 1934, Jacob Maged, a 49-year-old immigrant, was fined and jailed three months for charging 35 cents to press a suit rather rather than 40 cents mandated by the Fed's dry cleaning code. The NRA was later ruled unconstitutional. To raise farm prices, Roosevelt's farm policy plowed under 10 million acres of cultivated land, preventing wheat, corn and other crops from reaching the hungry. Hog farmers were paid to slaughter about 6 million young hogs, protested by John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. New Deal relief programs were steered away from the South, the nation's poorest region. ''A reported 15,654 people were forced from their homes to make way for dams,'' Powell writes. ''Farm owners received cash settlements for their condemned property, but the thousands of black tenant farmers got nothing.''
In contrast, the first Depression of the 20th century, in 1920, lasted only a year after Warren Harding cut taxes, slashed spending and returned to the poker table. But with the Great Depression, the myth has grown that unemployment and economic hardship were ended by magical New Deal fiat. The truth: The Depression ended with the buildup to World War II.
Most likely true...but Stalin didn't single out religious Jews for special persecution. He was also an equal-opportunity persecutor of believers.
Meanwhile, in most of Europe at that time Jews were being asked by unequal opportunity anti-semites to give up their lives.
In #100 I responded by noting that Hitler credited Henry Ford with some of his anti-Semitic ideas and asked Ohioan what parallels he wanted to draw from that.
What does that have to do with Ford's Masonic policies?
I think, I might know why. The "Dust bowl" can almost be considered in the separate context of agriculture. As a boy I knew a lot of "Okies" that were friends of my parents. The most knowledgeable attributed the dust bowl to massive over farming. The economics, though important, were a consequence of the dust bowl. One old guy, I remember as a kid, blamed it on the tractor. He said they never had any problems until the tractor allowed one farmer to plow the land of three.
Also, I think most of the poster's, though not all, are city boys. I have ranching experience, but farming is rocket science to me.
Could 'a been both. I do know the Japanese were interested in British refineries in Malaya that were supplying the RAF with 100 octane aviation fuel.
On that, my friend, we agree. WW2 was a 9/11, every hour, on the hour, for over five years.
I never said it was. I mentioned Henry Ford because you seemed to be strong parallels between FDR and Hitler based on a common approach to the problems of the Depression.
Marx had proposed the idea of rallying your support by focusing on a single target; he had also blamed the sins of Capitalism on a Jewish mindset, and suggested a world without Jews. Hitler simply grabbed the tactic and ran with it
The source of Hitler's anti-semitism is still disputed. I'm inclined to believe it's rooted in Europe's basic, centuries old religious prejudices spread by both the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Hitler was not an athiest. Rather he was an apostate who never renounced religion...and never was excommunicated. Nor was his regime punished by the Church.
On the subject of arrogance, have you ever seen pictures of FDR? Hitler may have been an arrogant ranter. FDR was the most arrogant snob, ever to sit in the oval office. To understand that Hitler and Stalin were demonstrably smarter than FDR, is not a cheap shot.
Ok. We differ. Let it go.
If the market had simply been allowed to adjust, free of gimmicks, it is true that many people would have had to take a cut in remuneration to find jobs, or settle in new areas; some perhaps even returning to subsistance farming. But people would have made adjustments, and gone back to work
The real world is never free of gimmicks (benefits accruing to certain, favored groups). One of the adjustments people quite commonly make in these situations is revolution, i.e. a revision of the rules which justifies mass theft of property and power.
Hitler - 12 million
Stalin - 27 million
Not so fast, my friend.
Hitler excommunicated himself through his actions; Church teaching is very clear on the matter. For that matter, the Church has not "excommuicated" Ted Kennedy, who through his incessant promotion of and largesse (public and private) to Planned Parenthood has WAY over-earned the public announcement of his excommunication.
WIthout the polemic, people excommunicate themselves. The Church's paperwork is always 'after-the-fact' and generally is not even sent.
As to "historic" anti-semitism--you will have to go a long way to prove that. While it is true that numbers of Christians are PERSONALLY anti-Semitic, it is flat-out UNTRUE that the Churches are so.
Hitler did exactly what he had learned (Marx was certainly not the first propagandist to come up with this): demonize somebody--ANYbody. The Jews were quite handy, and a small minority.
Finally, as to the Church's "Punishing" Hitler's regime: you must be kidding. Exactly whose Army was the Pope going to send? Should the Church have sent a Cardinal to Hitler with an engraved invitation to a trial in Rome? And which jails does the Church run?
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