Roosevelt is a saint compared to today’s Dems.
While hindsight is 20/20 regarding his government programs, he insisted on programs like the CCC because he thought it would be devastating to pay people not to work. They built parks, roadways, dams, etc., and were paid for it; he was determined not to reward idle people who’d lost their jobs.
I’m not a fan of Roosevelt, but I understand that he looked at other developed countries and saw the reactions to the economic depression (communism or fascism) - he sought a third way, and it seemed to work. Anarchists (Sacco/Vanzetti types) and communists were at work, and many people had no stake left in the shambles of the stock market crash; he had to get a large majority on the same page.
. . . I’m not a fan of Roosevelt, but I understand that he looked at other developed countries and saw the reactions to the economic depression (communism or fascism) - he sought a third way, and it seemed to work.
If so, he had Mussolini fooled. Actually, Mussolini invented Fascism as a “third way” from Capitalism and the Communism from which he broke away.Although our modern socialists' promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under 'communism' and 'fascism'. As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939,Early on, Mussolini thought the New Deal was Fascism.'the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and [already in 1939!] it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.’No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.What is promised to us as the Road to Freedom is in fact the Highroad to Servitude. For it is not difficult to see what must be the consequences when democracy embarks upon a course of planning. The goal of the planning will be described by some such vague term as 'the general welfare'. There will be no real agreement as to the ends to be attained, and the effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go: with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all.
____________— F A Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (May, 1945 Reader’s Digest Condensed Version)