Music to read by:
Pride you took, pride you feel
Pride that you felt when you'd kneel
Not the word, not the love
Not what you thought from above
It feeds (It feeds), it grows (It grows)
It clouds all that you will know
Deceit, deceive
Decide just what you believe
I see faith in your eyes
Never your hear the discouraging lies
I hear faith in your cries
Broken is the promise, betrayal
The healing hand held back by the deepened nail
Follow the god that failed
Pride you took, pride you feel
Pride that you felt when you'd kneel
Follow the god that failed
Follow the god that failed
Broken is the promise,
betrayal, betrayal
Franklin Delano Roosevelt is, along with Abraham Lincoln,
one of Barack Obama’s heroes, as Barack Obama is among the first to
point out. Accordingly, Obama is pursuing a number of the same
disastrous economic policies that Franklin Roosevelt pursued, which
policies only served to keep the United States depressed for years.
Yes, the truth about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which people on both
sides of the political spectrum hate to hear, is that he not only did not bring this country out of the Great Depression: he prolonged it for well over a decade.
By the time FDR’s reign of destruction was through, the United States was still in a deep depression, and the interventionist precedents he established, which served only to keep the country depressed, haunts America to this very day.
Never again, until Barack, has an American president so brazenly and so consistently demonstrated this lack of regard for individual human beings; and never since Barack has a president stomped so savagely upon the unalienable right to life and property.
Franklin Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945.
It was not until 1947, when wartime controls and government spending finally ended and free markets were at last allowed to operate somewhat freely – i.e. without the stranglehold of the federal government – that this country at last began to emerge from its eighteen-year depression.
That depression was much exacerbated by the interventionist Herbert Hoover, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt took interventionism to a whole new level.
Quoting FDR’s own economic adviser, Rexford Tugwell:
“The ideas embodied in the New Deal Legislation were a compilation of those which had come to maturity under Herbert Hoover’s aegis. We all of us owed much to Hoover” (Rexford Tugwell, 1946).
One of FDR’s first acts as President was to close down all banks, a maneuver he hoped would prevent scared depositors from withdrawing their savings.
What this maneuver actually did, however, was intensify the public’s panic. It didn’t improve banking at all, nor did it help in any way with the Great Depression.
Unemployment rates over the course of the Great Depression looked like this:
1929: 3.2%
1930: 8.7%
1931: 15.9%
1932: 23.6%
1933: 24.9%
1934: 21.7%
1935: 20.1%
1936: 16.9%
1937: 14.3%
1938: 19.0%
1939: 17.2%
1940: 14.6%
1930: 8.7%
1931: 15.9%
1932: 23.6%
1933: 24.9%
1934: 21.7%
1935: 20.1%
1936: 16.9%
1937: 14.3%
1938: 19.0%
1939: 17.2%
1940: 14.6%
FDR averaged 17.7 percent unemployment, which is staggering: to be more precise, FDR’s unemployment average was more than five times the 1929 level.
Many FDR apologists like to cite the 1933 to 1940 drop in unemployment as the greatest drop, percentage-wise, in the unemployment rate ever by an American President. Of course, what this fails to take into account, among a litany of other things, is the fact that centralized banking, as opposed to privatized, through the artificial manipulation of interest rates, caused the problems to begin with, and the subsequent interventions, first by Herbert Hoover and then by FDR, exploded those problems astronomically, as testified by the unprecedented unemployment rates that decade saw: in other words, 14 percent unemployment, is, by any legitimate standard, ghastly, and only a lunatic or a fool would call it “a success.”
Quoting economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway, who used statistical models to evaluate the results of FDR’s New Deal:
“The Great Depression was very significantly prolonged in both its duration and its magnitude by the impacts of New Deal programs.”
As Ludwig von Mises correctly noted, in the absence of government intervention, unemployment is always voluntary. Yet over ten million Americans were unemployed in 1938.
Compare that to the eight million in 1931.
Compare that to the fabled Great Depression of the 1930s. In the three years after 1933, the economy rebounded with growth rates of 11 percent, 9 percent, and 13 percent. But in 2010, months into our
recovery, growth was about 3 percent, followed by 1.7 percent growth in
2011. The rate for 2012 could be about 2 percent—below the 3.4 percent
throughout the postwar period.
Fact: not until FDR conscripted millions of men and sent them off to war did unemployment levels truly come down to manageable levels. Which, however, was hardly the end of the Great Depression; for unemployment, as everyone knows, is only one of several components. Thus:
In terms of aggregate production, statistics show no recovery until after World War II ended, when the size of government was at long last reduced.
The gross national product (GNP) didn’t recover to 1929 levels until 1940.
Personal consumption was 8 percent lower in 1940 than in 1929.
Net private investment, the backbone of a healthy economy, from 1930 to 1940 was negative $3.1 billion, a breathtaking figure.
Because of FDR’s mind-spinning interventionist policies, European nations came out of the Great Depression years ahead of America.
FDR believed that the Great Depression was caused by low wages. That was his fatal flaw. Because, in fact, the truth was the diametric opposite, as we now know: low wages (and prices) were caused by the depression.
And yet based upon this stupendous misunderstanding of basic economics, FDR proceeded to mandate wage and price controls, which thus kept the American people in a state of poverty for well over a decade.
When prices and wages are forced by government, the demand for labor is necessarily reduced. Why?
Because in order to stay in business, businesses must turn a profit; so that when wages and prices are forced, businesses must adjust their employment and spending accordingly, or they run out of money. They must therefore cut back on workforce, and they must decrease output. In this way, forced wages create unemployment. You see, not even FDR can subvert economic law.
This is the most basic cause and effect process you can imagine: employers simply cannot pay out money that they don’t have.
Production and production alone generates wealth. That’s another crux, and FDR’s interventionist policies crippled production.
By means of the National Industrial Relations Act (NIRA), FDR’s First New Deal sought to turn United States agriculture, and other industries, into a massive government cartel.
It was at this time also that FDR began restricting production, so that unemployment began increasing.
The NIRA failed spectacularly, but in the process, it gave birth to another disaster: the National Recovery Administration (NRA).
The NRA was bureaucratic up to the gills, and, among other things, it required every businessperson to sign a pledge to observe FDR’s job-destroying minimum-wage laws, his maximum-hour laws, and his prohibitions on “child labor” (i.e. teenage labor), and so on.
Prices were therefore not permitted to rise above or fall below “costs of production,” regardless of consumer demand.
According to Mr Obama, it was the role that government played that got us out of the Great Depression 12 years later, but he seems to have missed the point that the alphabet projects did NOT get up out of the depression. World War II did.
I guess that he is, subliminally, trying to tell us that:
Great Depression / Great Rescession: OUT
Progress: IN
...Which, of course, means the same thing...
(**eyeroll**)
Quoting historian John T. Flynn:
[Code-enforcement police] roamed through the garment district like storm troopers. They could enter a man’s factory, send him out, line up his employees, subject them to minute interrogation, take over his books at the instant. Night work was forbidden. Flying squadrons of these private coat-and-suit police went through the district at night, battering down doors with axes looking for men who were committing the crime of sewing together a pair of pants at night (John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, 2007).
Countless people across America were arrested and sentenced to jail or prison for invented crimes like “pressing suits of clothes for thirty-five cents when the Tailors’ Code fixed the price at forty cents” (Ibid).
FDR also made the private ownership of gold illegal.
He nationalised gold stocks.
He created an abortion called the Agriculture Adjustment
Administration (AAA), which implemented a government cartel on
agriculture markets, and which quite literally paid millions and
millions of dollars to farmers for slaughtering their livestock and
burning their fields, while the rest of the country starved.
Under the AAA, one sugar refining business was paid $1 million to not refine sugar.
He made null and void all existing contracts that promised to pay in gold, which was an act of pure and simple theft, and which in any case did not inflate prices, as was his whole intention in making gold illegal in the first place.
In 1935, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Roosevelt’s NRA and AAA were unconstitutional.
It’s worth noting also, if only for posterity's sake, that the NRA and the AAA were both explicitly modeled after Mussolini’s fascist system, of which FDR was an explicit admirer. FDR also emulated Mussolini’s propaganda campaign against freedom and free-markets. Under the Second New Deal, Roosevelt’s AAA, which the Supreme Court had declared unconstitutional, was, however, resurrected under the “soil conservation program.”
It too paid taxpayer money to farmers for not producing.
A number of other programs that the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional were simply reenacted by FDR under different names as well.
Many of these unconstitutional programs, also modeled after European fascism, are still in place today.
The Second New Deal, announced on January 4, 1935, introduced a number of new programs, in addition to the renamed old, each one equally unconstitutional, though never, alas, brought before the court.
There was, for instance, the National Labor Relations Act.
There was the Fair Labor Standards Act, which amounted to more job-destroying minimum-wage laws.
There was the Works Progress Administration.
Of course too there was the egregious and now bankrupted Social Security Act, which, among other things, forgot to take into account increasing life expectancies, and so was doomed to fail from the start, a fact which, unfortunately, most Americans don’t realize even today.
Also, the Norris-LaGuardia Act, which Herbert Hoover made into law in 1932, was much more stringently enforced under FDR’s authoritarian hand, thereby making it impossible to prosecute against labor union violence, of which the whole history of labor unions is largely composed.
Extortion by unions was under FDR legally permitted, as long as that extortion concerned “the payment of wages by a bona fide employer to a bona fide employee” (Congressional Record 78th Congress, first Session, House, 1934).
There were in addition, of course, the interminable taxes imposed upon businesspeople, which taxes siphoned money out of the private sector and increased unemployment, as taxes against entrepreneurs always and inevitably will, since they take away the capital that is normally used to reinvest and thus produce.
Indeed, tax increases (much of which were used to pay FDR’s bureaucrats) were as responsible as anything else for annihilating the American economy.
Quoting FDR’s adviser Harry Hopkins:
“I’ve got four million at work [in federally created jobs], but for God’s sake, don’t ask me what they are doing.”
This same Harry Hopkins again: “We shall tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect.”
Even prior to World War II, government spending under FDR doubled and then some.
Government spending went from $4.6 billion in 1932 to $9.1 billion in 1940.
Over $23 billion in deficits were accumulated.
Current profligacy makes these numbers look comical, and indeed in terms of sheer profligacy, Barack cannot be matched; but one must not fail to take into account the times.
Deficits annually during FDR’s reign averaged 42 percent of the federal budget, a truly incredible figure, especially considering that in 1932 FDR had the nerve to campaign against budget deficits, and he even vociferously denounced them.
The primary purpose of FDR’s preposterous New Deal spending – at least, according to many – was simply to ensure his reelection, because he, like his protégé, was another power-mad politician. Accordingly, he gave free money to hoards and hoards of poor people in exchange for the vote.
What follows is from the Official Report of the U.S. Senate Committee on Campaign Expenditures, 1938:
• In one Works Progress Administration (WPA) district in Kentucky, 349 WPA employees were put to work preparing forms listing the electoral preferences of every employee on work relief. Many of those who stated that they did not intend to vote for Roosevelt were laid off.
• In another Kentucky WPA district, government workers were required, as a condition of employment, to pledge to vote for the senior senator from Kentucky, who was an FDR supporter. If they refused, they were thrown off the relief rolls.
• Republicans in Kentucky were told that they would have to change party affiliations if they wanted to keep their WPA jobs.
• Letters were sent out to WPA employees in Kentucky instructing them to donate 2 percent of their salaries to the Roosevelt campaign if they wanted to keep their jobs.
• In Pennsylvania, businessmen who leased trucks to the WPA were solicited for $100 campaign contributions.
• As in Kentucky, Pennsylvania WPA workers were told to change their party affiliation if they wanted to keep their jobs. Many people refused and were fired.
• Government employment was increased dramatically right before the elections. In Pennsylvania, “employment cards” were distributed that entitled holders of the cards to “two to four weeks of employment around election time.”
• A Pennsylvania man who had been given a $60.50-per-month white-collar job was transferred to a pick-axe job in a limestone quarry after refusing to change his voter registration from Republican to Democrat.
• Tennessee WPA workers were also instructed to contribute 2 percent of their salaries to the Democratic Party as a condition of employment.
• In one congressional district in Cook County, Illinois, the WPA instructed 450 of its employees to canvass for (Democratic) votes around election time in 1938. The men were all laid off the day after the election.
In the words of historian Stanley High:
“In states like Florida and Kentucky – where the New Deal’s big fight was in the primary elections – the rise of WPA employment has hurried along in order to synchronize with the primaries” (Stanley High, “The WPA: Politicians’ Playground,” Current History, 1939).
In 1969, when all this evidence about New Deal spending came into the light, FDR apologists (i.e. academics) immediately began making excuses and rationalizing FDR’s disgustingly biased spending – for instance, the fact that residents of western states received 60 percent more federal money than residents of southern states. All the excuses these academics have made are factually inaccurate and have been refuted, many times over, by people like Jim F. Couch and William F. Shugart, in their excellent book Political Economy of the New Deal.
Franklin Roosevelt was, to quote one David Gordon, “a vain, intellectually shallow person whose principal interest was to retain at all costs his personal power” – i.e. “total subordination of his country’s welfare to his personal ambition” (David Gordon, “Power Mad,” 1999).
FDR had no grasp of economics, and in fact was really just another garden-variety politician, much like today’s world leaders, but more so.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt is, along with Abraham Lincoln,
one of Barack Obama’s heroes, as Barack Obama is among the first to
point out. Accordingly, Obama is pursuing a number of the same
disastrous economic policies that Franklin Roosevelt pursued, which
policies only served to keep the United States depressed for years.
Yes,
the truth about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which people on both sides
of the political spectrum hate to hear, is that he not only did not bring this country out of the Great Depression: he prolonged it for well over a decade.
By the time FDR’s reign of destruction was through, the United States was still
in a deep depression, and the interventionist precedents he
established, which served only to keep the country depressed, haunts
America to this very day.
Barack Hussein Obama...According to Time Magasine
Never
again, until Barack Obama, has an American president so brazenly and
so consistently demonstrated this lack of regard for individual human
beings; and never again, until Barack Obama, has a president stomped
so savagely upon the unalienable right to life, liberty and
property.
Franklin Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945.
It
was not until 1947, when wartime controls and government spending
finally ended and free markets were at last allowed to operate somewhat
freely – i.e. without the stranglehold of the federal government –
that this country at last began to emerge from its eighteen-year
depression.
That depression was much exacerbated by the Big Government, Progressive, interventionist Herbert Hoover, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt took interventionism to a whole new level.
“The
ideas embodied in the New Deal Legislation were a compilation of those
which had come to maturity under Herbert Hoover’s aegis. We all of us
owed much to Hoover.”
- Rexford Tugwell, FDR senior adviser and member of FDR "Brain Trust,", 1946
I
do so wish Progressives would decide whether Hoover was a good guy or a
bad guy. Personally, I think both he and FDR were unmitigated
disasters. Oh, and for all of you excuse makers out there:
Whining that “Hoover started it!” or “Bush did it, too!” is not a denial. It is a CONFESSION.
“We
are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not
work. . . . We have never made good on our promises. . . . I say after
eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment
as when we started. . . . And an enormous debt to boot!”
- Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Secretary of the Treasury, 13 May 1939
One
of FDR’s first acts as President was to close down all banks, a
maneuver he hoped would prevent scared depositors from withdrawing their
savings.
What
this maneuver actually did, however, was intensify the public’s
panic. It didn’t improve banking at all, nor did it help in any way
with the Grat Depression.
Unemployment rates over the course of the Great Depressi looked like this:
• 1929: 3.2 per cent
• 1930: 8.7 per cent
• 1931: 15.9 per cent
• 1932: 23.6 per cent
• 1933: 24.9 per cent
• 1934: 21.7 per cent
• 1935: 20.1 per cent
• 1936: 16.9 per cent
• 1937: 14.3 per cent
• 1938: 19.0 per cent
• 1939: 17.2 per cent
• 1940: 14.6 per cent
• 1931: 15.9 per cent
• 1932: 23.6 per cent
• 1933: 24.9 per cent
• 1934: 21.7 per cent
• 1935: 20.1 per cent
• 1936: 16.9 per cent
• 1937: 14.3 per cent
• 1938: 19.0 per cent
• 1939: 17.2 per cent
• 1940: 14.6 per cent
FDR averaged 17.7 per cent unemployment, which is staggering:
[T]o be more precise, FDR’s unemployment average was more than five times the 1929 level."
Many FDR apologists like to cite the 1933 to 1940 drop in unemployment as the greatest drop, percentage-wise, in the unemployment rate ever by an American President. Of course, what this fails to take into account, among a litany of other things, is the fact that centralised banking, as opposed to privatised, through the artificial manipulation of interest rates, caused the problems to begin with, and the subsequent interventions, first by Herbert Hoover and then by FDR, exploded those problems astronomically, as testified by the unprecedented unemployment rates that decade saw:
"In
other words, 14 per cent unemployment, is, by any legitimate
standard, ghastly, and only a lunatic or a fool would call it “a
success.”
Quoting economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway, who used statistical models to evaluate the results of FDR’s New Deal:
“The
Great Depression was very significantly prolonged in both its
duration and its magnitude by the impacts of New Deal programmes."
Compare that to the eight million in 1931.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt And Barack Hussein Obama III
In
1938, there were still 10 million Americans of working age, who were
unemployed. Compare that to the eight million in 1931. Hundreds of
millions of dollars spent resulting in higher unemployment. Replace the
"m" in "millions" with "tr" and the dark cloud of déjà vu should descend uncomfortably and enshroud you.
The truth of the matter is that it was not until FDR conscripted millions of men and sent them off to war did unemployment levels truly come down to manageable levels, which, however, was hardly the end of the Great Depression. As everyone should know, unemployment was only one of the several components.
Thus:
In
terms of aggregate production, statistics show no recovery until after
World War II ended, when the size of government was at long last
reduced.
The gross national product (GNP) didn’t recover to 1929 levels until 1940.
Personal consumption was 8 per cent lower in 1940 than in 1929.
Net private investment, the backbone of a healthy economy, from 1930 to 1940 was negative $3.1 billion, a breathtaking figure.
Because
of FDR’s mind-spinning interventionist policies, European nations came
out of the Great Depression years ahead of America.
FDR
believed that the Great Depression was caused by low wages. That was
his fatal flaw. Because, in fact, the truth was the diametric opposite,
as we now know: low wages (and prices) were caused by the depression.
And
yet based upon this stupendous misunderstanding of basic economics, FDR
proceeded to mandate wage and price controls, which thus kept the
American people in a state of poverty for well over a decade.
When
prices and wages are forced by government, the demand for labour is
necessarily reduced. Why? Because in order to stay in business,
businesses must turn a profit; so that when wages and prices are forced,
businesses must adjust their employment and spending accordingly, or
they run out of money. They must therefore cut back on workforce, and
they must decrease output. In this way, forced wages create
unemployment. You see, not even politicians can subvert or defy the laws
of economics.
This is the most basic cause and effect process you can imagine: employers simply cannot pay out money that they don’t have. Production and production alone generates wealth.
That’s another crux, and FDR’s interventionist policies crippled production.
By
means of the National Industrial Relations Act (NIRA), FDR’s First New
Deal sought to turn United States agriculture, and other industries,
into a massive government cartel.
“The Fascist Principles are very similar to those we have been evolving here in America.”
- National Recovery Administration
It was at this time also that FDR began restricting production, so that unemployment began increasing.
The
NIRA failed spectacularly, but in the process, it gave birth to another
disaster: the National Recovery Administration (NRA).
"Those who are not with us are against us.”
- NRA motto coined by its head, Hugh Johnson
The NRA was bureaucratic up to the
gills, and, among other things, it required every businessperson to sign
a pledge to observe FDR’s job-destroying minimum-wage laws, his
maximum-hour laws, and his prohibitions on “child labour” (i.e. teenage
labour), and so on.
Prices were therefore not permitted to rise above or fall below “costs of production,” regardless of consumer demand.
Quoting historian John T. Flynn:
"[Code-enforcement
police] roamed through the garment district like storm troopers. They
could enter a man’s factory, send him out, line up his employees,
subject them to minute interrogation, take over his books at the
instant. Night work was forbidden. Flying squadrons of these private
coat-and-suit police went through the district at night, battering down
doors with axes looking for men who were committing the crime of sewing
together a pair of pants at night."
- John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, 2007
Countless
people across America were arrested and sentenced to jail or prison for
invented crimes like “pressing suits of clothes for thirty-five cents
when the Tailors’ Code fixed the price at forty cents.."
FDR also made the private ownership of gold illegal.
"[Mussolini is an] admirable gentleman" and [I am] deeply ompressed by what he has accomplished."
- Franklin Delano Rooselvet
He nationalised gold stocks.
He
created an abortion called the Agriculture Adjustment Administration
(AAA), which implemented a government cartel on agriculture markets, and
which quite literally paid millions and millions of dollars to farmers
for slaughtering their livestock and burning their fields, while the
rest of the country starved.
"Reminiscent
of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy
to its own devices.…Without question, the mood accompanying this sea
change resembles that of Fascism.”
- Benito Mussolini on Roosevelt, Looking Forward
Under the AAA, which was later declared unconstitutional, one sugar refining business was paid $1 million to not refine sugar.
He
made null and void all existing contracts that promised to pay in gold,
which was an act of pure and simple theft, and which in any case did
not inflate prices, as was his whole intention in making gold illegal in
the first place.
In 1935, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Roosevelt’s NRA and AAA were unconstitutional.
It’s
worth noting also, if only for posterity sake, that the NRA and the AAA
were both explicitly modeled after Mussolini’s fascist system, of which
FDR was an explicit admirer.
FDR also emulated Mussolini’s propaganda campaign against freedom and free-markets.
“Fascist means to gain liberal ends.”
- Robert Shaw, Progressive writer, North American Review, 1934
Under
the Second New Deal, Roosevelt’s AAA, which the Supreme Court had
declared unconstitutional, was, however, resurrected under the “soil
conservation programme.”
It too paid taxpayer money to farmers for not producing.
A
number of other programmes that the Supreme Court ruled
unconstitutional were simply reenacted by FDR under different names as
well.
Many of these unconstitutional programmes, also modeled after European fascism, are still in place today.
The
Second New Deal, announced on 4 January 1935, introduced a number of
new programmes, in addition to the renamed old, each one equally
unconstitutional, though never, alas, brought before the court.
“Roosevelt’s
adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and
social policies...the development toward an authoritarian state based on
the demand that collective good be put before individual
self-interest.”
- Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, praising Roosevelt
There was, for instance, the National Labour Relations Act.
There was the Fair Labour Standards Act, which amounted to more job-destroying minimum-wage laws.
There was the Works Progress Administration.
Of
course too there was the egregious and now bankrupted Social Security
Act, which, among other things, forgot to take into account increasing
life expectancies, and so was doomed to fail from the start, a fact
which, unfortunately, most Americans don’t realize even today.
“If
we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing
to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline. We are, I know, ready
and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because
it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. I assume
unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army.…I shall ask the
Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad
executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the
power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign
foe.”
- President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Also,
the Norris-LaGuardia Act, which Herbert Hoover made into law in 1932,
was much more stringently enforced under FDR’s authoritarian hand,
thereby making it impossible to prosecute against labour union violence,
of which the whole history of labour unions is largely composed.
Extortion
by unions was under FDR legally permitted, as long as that extortion
concerned “the payment of wages by a bona fide employer to a bona fide
employee” (Congressional Record 78th Congress, first Session, House,
1934).
There
were in addition, of course, the interminable taxes imposed upon
businesspeople, which taxes siphoned money out of the private sector and
increased unemployment, as taxes against entrepreneurs always and
inevitably will, since they take away the capital that is normally used
to reinvest and thus produce.
Indeed,
tax increases (much of which were used to pay FDR’s bureaucrats) were
as responsible as anything else for annihilating the American economy.
Quoting FDR’s adviser Harry Hopkins:
“I’ve got four million at work [in federally created jobs], but for God’s sake, don’t ask me what they are doing.”
This same Harry Hopkins again:
“We shall tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect.”
Even prior to World War II, government spending under FDR doubled and then some.
Government spending went from $4.6 billion in 1932 to $9.1 billion in 1940.
Over $23 billion in deficits were accumulated.
Current
profligacy makes these numbers look comical, and indeed in terms of
sheer profligacy, Barack cannot be matched; but one must not fail to
take into account the times. On his watch, the United States has lost
its stellar AAA credit rate and public debt now exceeds 100% - a 59% increase since Obama took office and said public debt now exceeds $10 trillion dollars.
Deficits
annually during FDR’s reign averaged 42 per cent of the federal budget,
a truly incredible figure, especially considering that in 1932 FDR had
the nerve to campaign against budget deficits, and he even vociferously
denounced them.
The
primary purpose of FDR’s preposterous New Deal spending – at least,
according to many – was simply to ensure his reelection, because he,
like his protégé, was another power-mad politician. Accordingly, he gave
free money to hoards and hoards of poor people in exchange for the
vote.
What follows is from the Official Report of the U.S. Senate Committee on Campaign Expenditures, 1938:
•
In one Works Progress Administration (WPA) district in Kentucky, 349
WPA employees were put to work preparing forms listing the electoral
preferences of every employee on work relief. Many of those who stated
that they did not intend to vote for Roosevelt were laid off.
•
In another Kentucky WPA district, government workers were required, as a
condition of employment, to pledge to vote for the senior senator from
Kentucky, who was an FDR supporter. If they refused, they were thrown
off the relief rolls.
• Republicans in Kentucky were told that they would have to change party affiliations if they wanted to keep their WPA jobs.
•
Letters were sent out to WPA employees in Kentucky instructing them to
donate 2 per cent of their salaries to the Roosevelt campaign if they
wanted to keep their jobs.
• In Pennsylvania, businessmen who leased trucks to the WPA were solicited for $100 campaign contributions.
•
As in Kentucky, Pennsylvania WPA workers were told to change their
party affiliation if they wanted to keep their jobs. Many people refused
and were fired.
•
Government employment was increased dramatically right before the
elections. In Pennsylvania, “employment cards” were distributed that
entitled holders of the cards to “two to four weeks of employment around
election time.”
•
A Pennsylvania man who had been given a $60.50-per-month white-collar
job was transferred to a pick-axe job in a limestone quarry after
refusing to change his voter registration from Republican to Democrat.
•
Tennessee WPA workers were also instructed to contribute 2 per cent of
their salaries to the Democratic Party as a condition of employment.
•
In one congressional district in Cook County, Illinois, the WPA
instructed 450 of its employees to canvass for (Democratic) votes around
election time in 1938. The men were all laid off the day after the
election.
(Cited in John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, and How Capitalism Saved America, by Thomas Dilorenzo.)
In the words of historian Stanley High:
“In
states like Florida and Kentucky – where the New Deal’s big fight was
in the primary elections – the rise of WPA employment has hurried along
in order to synchronize with the primaries.”
- Stanley High, “The WPA: Politicians’ Playground,” Current History, 1939
In 1969, when all this evidence about New Deal spending came into the light, FDR apologists
(i.e. academics) immediately began making excuses and rationalising
FDR’s disgustingly biased spending – for instance, the fact that
residents of western states received 60 per cent more federal money than
residents of southern states. All the excuses these academics have made
are factually inaccurate and have been refuted, many times over, by
people like Jim F. Couch and William F. Shugart, in their excellent book
Political Economy of the New Deal.
Franklin Roosevelt was, to quote one David Gordon:
“...a vain, intellectually shallow person whose principal interest was to retain at all costs his personal power” – i.e. “total subordination of his country’s welfare to his personal ambition.”
- David Gordon, “Power Mad,” 1999
FDR
had no grasp of economics, and in fact was really just another
garden-variety politician, much like today’s world leaders, but more so.
"Remember
well that attitude and method --the way we do things, not just the way
we say things—is nearly always the measure of one's sincerity."
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Butte, Montana, 19 September 1932
Paul Warburg, one-time ardent Roosevelt supporter, admirer, and friend, 31 August 1935:
"We
have come to the point where we must appraise Franklin D. Roosevelt by
his own standard, for it is only upon a judgment so arrived at that we
can intelligently decide whether to be for him or against him...I am
against him, and the purpose of this book, Hell Bent for Election, is to tell you why.
There
would be no reason to do this were it not for the very definite hope
that my feelings may find an echo and my reasoning a response among
those who share in the ever growing realization throughout the country
that we are on the brink of a momentous decision."
Warburg also wrote a sequel in 1936, Still Hell Bent.
Which depression lasted 18 months and which lasted 18 years - the Depression of the Early 1920s or the Great Depression?
Over ten million Americans were still unemployed in 1938. Compare that to the eight million in 1931.
It
was not until FDR conscripted millions of men and sent them off to war
did unemployment levels truly come down to manageable levels. Which,
however, was hardly the end of the Great Depression; for unemployment,
as everyone knows, is only one of several components.
Thus:
In
terms of aggregate production, statistics show no recovery until
after World War II ended, when the size of government was at long last
reduced.
The gross national product (GNP) didn’t recover to 1929 levels until 1940.
Personal consumption was 8 percent lower in 1940 than in 1929.
Net private investment, the backbone of a healthy economy, from 1930 to 1940 was negative $3.1 billion, a breathtaking figure.
Because
of FDR’s mind-spinning interventionist policies, European nations
came out of the Great Depression years ahead of America.
FDR
believed that the Great Depression was caused by low wages. That was
his fatal flaw. Because, in fact, the truth was the diametric
opposite, as we now know: low wages (and prices) were caused by the
depression.
And
yet based upon this stupendous misunderstanding of basic economics,
FDR proceeded to mandate wage and price controls, which thus kept the
American people in a state of poverty for well over a decade.
When
prices and wages are forced by government, the demand for labor is
necessarily reduced. Why? Because in order to stay in business,
businesses must turn a profit; so that when wages and prices are forced,
businesses must adjust their employment and spending accordingly, or
they run out of money. They must therefore cut back on workforce, and
they must decrease output. In this way, forced wages create
unemployment. You see, not even FDR can subvert economic law.
This is the most basic cause and effect process you can imagine: employers simply cannot pay out money that they don’t have.
Production and production alone generates wealth. That’s another crux, and FDR’s interventionist policies crippled production.
By
means of the National Industrial Relations Act (NIRA), FDR’s First
New Deal sought to turn United States agriculture, and other
industries, into a massive government cartel.
It was at this time also that FDR began restricting production, so that unemployment began increasing.
The
NIRA failed spectacularly, but in the process, it gave birth to
another disaster: the National Recovery Administration (NRA).
The
NRA was bureaucratic up to the gills, and, among other things, it
required every businessperson to sign a pledge to observe FDR’s
job-destroying minimum-wage laws, his maximum-hour laws, and his
prohibitions on “child labor” (i.e. teenage labor), and so on.
Prices were therefore not permitted to rise above or fall below “costs of production,” regardless of consumer demand.
Quoting historian John T. Flynn:
"[Code-enforcement
police] roamed through the garment district like storm troopers. They
could enter a man’s factory, send him out, line up his employees,
subject them to minute interrogation, take over his books at the
instant. Night work was forbidden. Flying squadrons of these private
coat-and-suit police went through the district at night, battering down
doors with axes looking for men who were committing the crime of
sewing together a pair of pants at night."
- John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, 2007
Countless
people across America were arrested and sentenced to jail or prison
for invented crimes like “pressing suits of clothes for thirty-five
cents when the Tailors’ Code fixed the price at forty cents.."
FDR also made the private ownership of gold illegal.
He nationalised gold stocks.
He
created an abortion called the Agriculture Adjustment Administration
(AAA), which implemented a government cartel on agriculture markets,
and which quite literally paid millions and millions of dollars to
farmers for slaughtering their livestock and burning their fields,
while the rest of the country starved.
Under the AAA, which was later declared unconstitutional, one sugar refining business was paid $1 million to not refine sugar.
He
made null and void all existing contracts that promised to pay in
gold, which was an act of pure and simple theft, and which in any case
did not inflate prices, as was his whole intention in making gold
illegal in the first place.
In 1935, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Roosevelt’s NRA and AAA were unconstitutional.
It’s
worth noting also, if only for posterity sake, that the NRA and the
AAA were both explicitly modeled after Mussolini’s fascist system, of
which FDR was an explicit admirer.
FDR also emulated Mussolini’s propaganda campaign against freedom and free-markets.
Under
the Second New Deal, Roosevelt’s AAA, which the Supreme Court had
declared unconstitutional, was, however, resurrected under the “soil
conservation program.”
It too paid taxpayer money to farmers for not producing.
A
number of other programmes that the Supreme Court ruled
unconstitutional were simply reenacted by FDR under different names as
well.
Many of these unconstitutional programs, also modeled after European fascism, are still in place today.
The
Second New Deal, announced on January 4, 1935, introduced a number of
new programmes, in addition to the renamed old, each one equally
unconstitutional, though never, alas, brought before the court.
There was, for instance, the National Labor Relations Act.
There was the Fair Labor Standards Act, which amounted to more job-destroying minimum-wage laws.
There was the Works Progress Administration.
Of
course too there was the egregious and now bankrupted Social Security
Act, which, among other things, forgot to take into account
increasing life expectancies, and so was doomed to fail from the start,
a fact which, unfortunately, most Americans don’t realize even
today.
Also,
the Norris-LaGuardia Act, which Herbert Hoover made into law in 1932,
was much more stringently enforced under FDR’s authoritarian hand,
thereby making it impossible to prosecute against labor union violence,
of which the whole history of labor unions is largely composed.
Extortion
by unions was under FDR legally permitted, as long as that extortion
concerned “the payment of wages by a bona fide employer to a bona fide
employee” (Congressional Record 78th Congress, first Session, House,
1934).
There
were in addition, of course, the interminable taxes imposed upon
businesspeople, which taxes siphoned money out of the private sector
and increased unemployment, as taxes against entrepreneurs always and
inevitably will, since they take away the capital that is normally used
to reinvest and thus produce.
Indeed,
tax increases (much of which were used to pay FDR’s bureaucrats) were
as responsible as anything else for annihilating the American
economy.
Quoting FDR’s adviser Harry Hopkins:
“I’ve got four million at work [in federally created jobs], but for God’s sake, don’t ask me what they are doing.”
This same Harry Hopkins again:
“We shall tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect.”
Even prior to World War II, government spending under FDR doubled and then some.
Government spending went from $4.6 billion in 1932 to $9.1 billion in 1940.
Over $23 billion in deficits were accumulated.
Current
profligacy makes these numbers look comical, and indeed in terms of
sheer profligacy, Barack cannot be matched; but one must not fail to
take into account the times. On his watch, the United States has lost
its stellar AAA credit rate and public debt now exceeds 100% - a 59% increase since Obama took office and said public debt now exceeds $10 trillion dollars.
Deficits
annually during FDR’s reign averaged 42 percent of the federal
budget, a truly incredible figure, especially considering that in 1932
FDR had the nerve to campaign against budget deficits, and he even
vociferously denounced them.
The
primary purpose of FDR’s preposterous New Deal spending – at least,
according to many – was simply to ensure his reelection, because he,
like his protégé, was another power-mad politician. Accordingly, he
gave free money to hoards and hoards of poor people in exchange for the
vote.
What follows is from the Official Report of the U.S. Senate Committee on Campaign Expenditures, 1938:
•
In one Works Progress Administration (WPA) district in Kentucky, 349
WPA employees were put to work preparing forms listing the electoral
preferences of every employee on work relief. Many of those who stated
that they did not intend to vote for Roosevelt were laid off.
•
In another Kentucky WPA district, government workers were required,
as a condition of employment, to pledge to vote for the senior senator
from Kentucky, who was an FDR supporter. If they refused, they were
thrown off the relief rolls.
• Republicans in Kentucky were told that they would have to change party affiliations if they wanted to keep their WPA jobs.
•
Letters were sent out to WPA employees in Kentucky instructing them
to donate 2 percent of their salaries to the Roosevelt campaign if they
wanted to keep their jobs.
• In Pennsylvania, businessmen who leased trucks to the WPA were solicited for $100 campaign contributions.
•
As in Kentucky, Pennsylvania WPA workers were told to change their
party affiliation if they wanted to keep their jobs. Many people refused
and were fired.
•
Government employment was increased dramatically right before the
elections. In Pennsylvania, “employment cards” were distributed that
entitled holders of the cards to “two to four weeks of employment around
election time.”
•
A Pennsylvania man who had been given a $60.50-per-month white-collar
job was transferred to a pick-axe job in a limestone quarry after
refusing to change his voter registration from Republican to Democrat.
•
Tennessee WPA workers were also instructed to contribute 2 percent of
their salaries to the Democratic Party as a condition of employment.
•
In one congressional district in Cook County, Illinois, the WPA
instructed 450 of its employees to canvass for (Democratic) votes around
election time in 1938. The men were all laid off the day after the
election.
In the words of historian Stanley High:
“In
states like Florida and Kentucky – where the New Deal’s big fight was
in the primary elections – the rise of WPA employment has hurried
along in order to synchronize with the primaries.”
- Stanley High, “The WPA: Politicians’ Playground,” Current History, 1939
In 1969, when all this evidence about New Deal spending came into the light, FDR apologists
(i.e. academics) immediately began making excuses and rationalising
FDR’s disgustingly biased spending – for instance, the fact that
residents of western states received 60 per cent more federal money than
residents of southern states. All the excuses these academics have
made are factually inaccurate and have been refuted, many times over,
by people like Jim F. Couch and William F. Shugart, in their excellent
book Political Economy of the New Deal.
Franklin Roosevelt was, to quote one David Gordon:
“...a
vain, intellectually shallow person whose principal interest was to
retain at all costs his personal power” – i.e. “total subordination of
his country’s welfare to his personal ambition.”
- David Gordon, “Power Mad,” 1999
FDR had no grasp of economics, and in fact was really just another garden-variety politician, much like today’s world leaders, but more so...well, that was until Barack Obama.
Related Reading:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Barack Obama
If You Want Obamavilles, Repeat What Hoover Did
THIS IS MAIN STREET, OBAMAVILLE: ALL BUMPS, NO ROAD.
Mort Zuckerman: President Obama's Economic Programs Have Failed
Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death...You Ca Keep The "Equality"
The Welfare State Is Destroying America - I
The Welfare State Is Destroying America - II
The Left’s Gordian Knot
Beyond Blue: The Great Divorce
The Absolute Shalls of the Progressive Left Return
We've About Run Out Of Other People's Money
Last Exit to Utopia
Progressivism as Conservatism
Newt: The Grinch The Stole Labour or A Modern-Day Moses, Who Wants To Lead The Next Generation Out Of Detroit?!?!?
Slouching and Slothing Our Way to Ameritopia
The Great California Exodus
Washington! We Have A Problem! When Your Pros Can't Pick Out The Pros in the PleyClub, Some Heads Need To Roll!!
Pride you took, pride you feel
Pride that you felt when you'd kneel
Not the word, not the love
Not what you thought from above
It feeds (It feeds), it grows (It grows)
It clouds all that you will know
Deceit, deceive
Decide just what you believe
I see faith in your eyes
Never your hear the discouraging lies
I hear faith in your cries
Broken is the promise, betrayal
The healing hand held back by the deepened nail
Follow the god that failed
Find your peace, find your say
Find the smooth road in your way
Trust you gave, a child to save
Left you cold and him in grave
It feeds (It feeds), it grows (It grows)
It clouds all that you will know
Deceit, deceive
Decide just what you believe
I see faith in your eyes
Never you hear the discouraging lies
I hear faith in your cries
Broken is the promise, betrayal
The healing hand held back by the deepened nail
Follow the god that failed
I see faith in your eyes
Broken is the promise, betrayal
The healing hand held back by the deepened nail
Follow the god that failed
Pride you took, pride you feel
Pride that you felt when you'd kneel
Trust you gave, a child to save
Left you cold and him in grave
I see faith in your eyes
Never you hear the discouraging lies
I hear faith in your cries
Broken is the promise, betrayal
The healing hand held back by deepened nail
Follow the god that failed
Follow the god that failed
Broken is the promise, betrayal, betrayal
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