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Except this time there won't be WW3 to bail out Obama.
I think that, however, we can at least agree that FDR was pretty much Godlike compared to Obama, or any modern politician. Even without the War the US was starting to recover properly.
And when the war started? He was a hell of a tough cookie.
During the Great Depression--we had spurts of employment gains only to watch them drop again--when a big project was complete. But you're right Obama is NO FDR. FDR was a leader--not a community organizer--and when he had a plan it was an original plan--and not copied from another President from another century!
Except this time there won't be WW3 to bail out Obama.
During the Great Depression--we had spurts of employment gains only to watch them drop again--when a big project was complete. But you're right Obama is NO FDR. FDR was a leader--not a community organizer--and when he had a plan it was an original plan--and not copied from another President from another century!
Actually, most of FDR's schemes were copied from Mussolini. The NRA was modeled on Mussolini's economic policies.
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Roosevelt also instituted the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which was led by Hugh Iron Pants Johnson, a passionate disciple of fascism who personally distributed innumerable copies of the openly fascist tract, The Corporate State (authored by Raffaello Viglione, one of Mussolinis favorite economists). Under Johnson's leadership, the NRA imposed hundreds of onerous codes on businesses -- mandating industry collusion and price-fixing that virtually eliminated competition and the free market. Threatening that Americans who failed to cooperate with the NRA's dictates would get a sock in the nose, Johnson emphasized that the Roosevelt administration's war on the depression was lethal and more menacing than any other crisis in our history.
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The fascist mindset underlying the NRA's authoritarian mandates was confirmed in the results of a study commissioned by the NRA's own Research and Planning Division. Titled "Capitalism and Labor Under Fascism," it concluded: The fascist principles are very similar to those which have been evolving in America and so are of particular interest at this time.
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The website you are quoting is an obscure, openly partisan, poorly sourced diatribe that defines "the left" to include jihad and genocide. It seems to have given you a grossly distorted view of history.
Fascism and Mussolini were both surprisingly popular in the United States when FDR took office, though more with conservatives than liberals (some liberals liked fascism, but most preferred socialism or communism). FDR was happy to borrow from Europe, and fascism was one of the inspirations for the New Deal. More important, however, were: Herbert Hoover's policies (actual and proposed), state level anti-Depression measures (especially New York's), the economic mobilization for WWI, and socialism and communism.
As for Hugh Johnson, he was indeed a proponent of fascism. When this became apparent, FDR fired him.
While the rest of the world was showing signs of economic recovery, the United States remained mired in the Great Depression up until December, 1941
You omit the tidbit that Roosevelt's "Brain Trust", who entered office along with him and gained the halls of political power as well, paid an illegal visit to the Soviet Union in 1927 to tour its works and also have a personal one on one visit with the gentleman they were most enamored with, Joseph Stalin. The result here was a string of collective farms across the Southwest, and the highpoint, suing the Schechter Brothers, immigrant Hungarian Kosher butchers in Brooklyn for violating New Deal Regulations by letting their customers pick out which chickens they wanted slaughtered, of all things. The whole world was entraced by the Socialist experiment, not the least of which was America's then Liberal chattering class.
The Federal Government's impact and effect on the nation's economy was insignificant, the end of February, 1933. On the first of December, 1941 its impact and effect on the nation's economy was huge.
The tremendous economic growth of the Federal Government came at the expense of the American people, off their backs, their feet, and out of their mouths.
We are seeing the echos of that effect today.
The website you are quoting is an obscure, openly partisan, poorly sourced diatribe that defines "the left" to include jihad and genocide. It seems to have given you a grossly distorted view of history.
Fascism and Mussolini were both surprisingly popular in the United States when FDR took office, though more with conservatives than liberals (some liberals liked fascism, but most preferred socialism or communism). FDR was happy to borrow from Europe, and fascism was one of the inspirations for the New Deal. More important, however, were: Herbert Hoover's policies (actual and proposed), state level anti-Depression measures (especially New York's), the economic mobilization for WWI, and socialism and communism.
As for Hugh Johnson, he was indeed a proponent of fascism. When this became apparent, FDR fired him.
While the rest of the world was showing signs of economic recovery, the United States remained mired in the Great Depression up until December, 1941
You omit the tidbit that Roosevelt's "Brain Trust", who entered office along with him and gained the halls of political power as well, paid an illegal visit to the Soviet Union in 1927 to tour its works and also have a personal one on one visit with the gentleman they were most enamored with, Joseph Stalin. The result here was a string of collective farms across the Southwest, and the highpoint, suing the Schechter Brothers, immigrant Hungarian Kosher butchers in Brooklyn for violating New Deal Regulations by letting their customers pick out which chickens they wanted slaughtered, of all things. The whole world was entraced by the Socialist experiment, not the least of which was America's then Liberal chattering class.
The Federal Government's impact and effect on the nation's economy was insignificant, the end of February, 1933. On the first of December, 1941 its impact and effect on the nation's economy was huge.
The tremendous economic growth of the Federal Government came at the expense of the American people, off their backs, their feet, and out of their mouths.
We are seeing the echos of that effect today.
You raise two issues, the relation between the New Deal and socialism, and the effectiveness on the New Deal. I hadn't addressed either because I was responding to a post accusing FDR of fascism, not socialism or ineffectiveness.
Regarding socialism, certainly the New Deal was more socialist than previous government actions had been. Increased government spending and social welfare programs are certainly what I would call at least somewhat socialist. However, I think FDR was primarily motivated by the need to respond to events rather than an overall socialist philosophy. After all, when Bush pushed through TARP it wasn't because he suddenly came to the conclusion that banks should be nationalized-- he was responding to a crisis.
Socialism was part of the dialogue in FDR's administration. Part of that was a matter of language-- most people wouldn't refer today to Social Security or Medicare as socialism. However, it is certainly true that communism was very much in vogue with the American left at the time (I say "left" and not liberals because self-described liberals rejected socialism in favor of FDR's less extreme programs). Part of this was based on a genuine naivete about the totalitarian implications of Stalinism. I can't defend this position among American leftists of the era except to point out that they did not have all the facts, and that the notion of an American dictatorship was popular across the political spectrum.
As to the charge of the Brain Trust meeting with Stalin, you seem to have your facts wrong. There was no Brain Trust in 1927. Two of the fifteen men who would eventually be considered part of the Brain Trust did go to the Soviet Union, though I don't know what would have been illegal about this. I am enormously skeptical that the NIRA's "sick chickens" case can be tied to this visit by anything other than conspiracy theories.
As to the effectiveness of the New Deal, macroeconomics is an imprecise enough science that you can find people making a wide variety of claims. Certainly, I'm sure you could produce tracts by credentialed economists at the Cato Institute or the AEI arguing that the New Deal was the worst thing possible for the economy. However, contemporary economists as a whole and the American population that lived through the Great Depression broadly agree that FDR's stewardship of the economy had a positive effect.
The comparison to other countries is itself a difficult subject. The US had to deal with certain issues that other countries did not (the Dust Bowl, for one), and some of the countries did better precisely by pursuing more aggressive Keynesian spending programs. In any event, I think it is a little silly to suggest that other first world countries (which tended then, as now, to be in Western Europe) were in better shape than the US in 1941.
