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Historian Burton Folsom discusses quid pro quo, abuse of power and FDR's presidency: Video

It is hard to come up with gifts for people who already seem to have everything. But there are few -- if any -- people who can keep up with the flood of books coming off the presses. Books can be good gifts for such people. Among the books I read this year, the one that made the biggest impact on me was "New Deal or Raw Deal" ($10.20; 32% OFF) by Burton Folsom, Jr., a professor at Hillsdale College. It was that rare kind of book, one thoroughly researched by a scholar and yet written in plain language, readily...

There aren’t any sex scenes or vampires, and it won’t help you lose weight. But House Republicans are tearing through the pages of Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man” like soccer moms before book club night. Shlaes’ 2007 take on the Great Depression questions the success of the New Deal and takes issue with the value of government intervention in a major economic crisis — red meat for a party hungry for empirical evidence that the Democrats’ spending plans won’t end the current recession. “There aren’t many books that take a negative look at the New Deal,” explained Republican policy aide...

Guess who said the following: "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work." Was it Sarah Palin? Rush Limbaugh? Karl Rove? Not even close. It was Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury under Franklin D. Roosevelt and one of FDR's closest advisers. He added, "after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . And an enormous debt to boot!" This is just one of the remarkable and eye-opening facts in a must-read book titled "New Deal or Raw Deal?"...

Larry Schweikart, previously co-author of A Patriot’s History of the United States, is author of the new (released today) 49 Liberal Lies About American History (That You Probably Learned in School). A professor of history at the University of Dayton, he takes some opening-day questions from NRO editor Kathryn Lopez, in the hopes of undoing some of the lies early in the school year. Kathryn Jean Lopez: So only 49? Larry Schweikart: You know, publishers do have cost restraints. The original version was the size of The Historical Statistics of the United States. So we allowed for volume 2, 3,...

[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...

Before my spirited exchange with my esteemed friend Amity Shlaes about the New Deal reaches the point of diminishing returns, it should be possible to agree on some points that may be applicable to current economic questions. I think we agree that Obamanomics has not succeeded, beyond a tentative stabilization, easily shaken by lack of public confidence in the regime and the absence of any serious deficit-reduction plan. We seem also to agree that unfocused fiscal profligacy on the scale of the $800 billion stimulus bill has not led to significant reductions in unemployment, that more of the same will...

Why should so many Americans resent and distrust the very institutions that make possible our productivity, pleasure and opportunities? Given the fact that major corporations provide virtually every one of the commodities and comforts we consume, it makes no sense to feel hostile and contemptuous of the corporate organization of the contemporary economy. As I write these words – and as you read them –we all rely on the products of major companies with increasingly far flung and international operations. Leave aside for a moment the obvious example of the complex combination of brilliantly designed computer hardware and software that...

The purpose of government is for those who run it to plunder those who do not. Throughout history, governments have used violence, intimidation, coercion, and mass murder to enforce this system. But governments' first line of "defense" is always a blizzard of lies — about its own alleged benevolence, altruism, heroism, and greatness, along with equally big lies about the "evils" of the civil society, especially the free market.The current economic crisis, which was instigated by the government's central bank and its boom-and-bust monetary policies, among other interventions, has once again been blamed on "too little regulation" and too...

I am currently planning an essay and a youtube presentation about FDR's new deal. I want to refute claims that it brought an end to the Great Depresion and show that it actually made the depresion worse. I've been getting a lot of moonbats on Youtube and my blog claiming that Obama's stimulus package will save America the way FDRs new Deal did. :ROLLS EYES: I need some help refuting them. Articles, graphs, you could reference would be appreciated. Thanks.

“Whereas before there had been almost no framework to explain what Roosevelt was doing, now a respectable one was forming. Spending promoted growth, if government was big enough to spend enough.” ~ Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Perhaps as a result of all the commentary suggesting that we’re in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, there’s lots of talk about what led us out of same. It’s conventional wisdom that the government spending wrought by World War II ultimately sparked our emergence from the 1930s downturn, but the evidence suggests otherwise. World War II...

We keep seeing the same liberal argument being played over and over again. As the mainstream media seek to make their case to the American people that the Bush tax cuts should expire, one of the primary strategies being employed is to claim that Republicans are refusing to "pay for" their extension of the tax cuts. And that therefore the Republicans will hike the deficit. The problem is that it's a false premise, based on a static conception of human behavior that refuses to take into account the fact that people's behavior changes depending upon how much of their money...

I just bought a Kindal and and was reconnected to the written word, after our local book store went South and I ain't driving 40 miles when I get a word lust. I have been interested in the overthrow of the Constitution during the FDR Dictatorship, my Grandfathers discription, but Amazon is difficult to search most of what I find is FDR butt lickers. I have read a number of LS type economists but the list is rather short on the site, need help.

Your ‘Robber Baron,’ My American Hero - Or at least that’s true in many cases JONAH GOLDBERG In terms of blunders, it’s not quite launching a land war in Southeast Asia, but one would still be well-advised not to rely on Nancy Pelosi for lessons on history or economics. “We are living in a new era of robber barons,” the woman-who-would-be-Speaker proclaimed recently. “The American consumer is paying record prices, while oil companies make record profits and make record contributions to Republicans.” Ah, the Robber Barons: those bloody-lipped ghouls preying on the downtrodden. Clearly using the Liberal Field Guide to...

Sure, the vast majority of Americans think the New Deal worked well. But are conservatives right? Did the New Deal's "massive government intervention prolong the Great Depression?" Ummm ... no. On deeper examination, I discovered that the right bases its New Deal revisionism on the short-lived recession in a year straddling 1937 and 1938. But that was four years into Roosevelt's term -- four years marked by spectacular economic growth. Additionally, the fleeting decline happened not because of the New Deal's spending programs, but because Roosevelt momentarily listened to conservatives and backed off them. As Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman notes,...

With the flood of spending coming from the stimulus bill, several governors have held firm to principle. They don't want to take the federal money if federal strings are attached. In particular, they are reluctant to take, for example, the new money for Head Start and child care subsidies if it means the states have to pick up the programs when the stimulus money runs out. As Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina says, "There's no way politically we're going to be able to push people out of the program in two years when the federal money runs out." In...

[This article is excerpted from chapter 7 of How Capitalism Saved America.] Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government… for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence. — Murray N. Rothbard, The Logic of Action (1997) The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often referred to as the time of the "robber barons."It is a staple...

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” Sound like Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, or perhaps another exasperated Republican stalwart, lamenting President Barack Obama’s inclination this week to try to spend our way out of the recession? Listen again: “I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises.” Sound more like a liberal Democrat -- say, Harlem’s Rep. Charlie Rangel -- pushing Obama to...

It's a myth. FDR did not get us out of the Great Depression—not during the 1930s, and only in a limited sense during World War II. Let's start with the New Deal. Its various alphabet-soup agencies—the WPA, AAA, NRA and even the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority)—failed to create sustainable jobs. In May 1939, U.S. unemployment still exceeded 20%. European countries, according to a League of Nations survey, averaged only about 12% in 1938. The New Deal, by forcing taxes up and discouraging entrepreneurs from investing, probably did more harm than good.

Reporting from Dunwoody, Ga. — For more than half a century, biographers have treated Franklin Delano Roosevelt with Rushmore-like reverence, celebrating the nation's 32nd president as a colossus who eased the agony of the Great Depression and saved democracy from Nazi Germany. Which never sat right with historian Burton Folsom Jr. Growing up in Nebraska, Folsom remembers, his dad, a savings and loan executive, griped about high taxes and Roosevelt's voracious ambition. FDR was dead, but his legacy — deficit spending, an activist federal government, an expansive social safety net — lived on.