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You are perhaps implying I am a dogmatist. But the facts are that, in the depth of the Depression, unemployment was about 25%.

That's brutal, and it calls for emergency feeding and housing programs, but it doesn't mean you have to have a coup against the Constitution and put the FedGov on a trajectory to consume fivefold more of the nation's output each year.

But that is what happened. Housing and feeding the poor was a small part of FDR's program, and the Republicans would have done that, too.

You need not buy into 95% of what FDR did in order to defend the imperative that Americans not starve.

But the facts are that, in the depth of the Depression, unemployment was about 25%.

Today, the bottom 25% of the population pays 3-4% of the income tax collected by the Federal government which means that most of them have no earned income.

Apparently they're unemployable at all times in all places.

You are perhaps implying I am a dogmatist.

I wouldn't think of it, since I don't know you. But there are people on the Internet and in think tanks who don't realize how dire the situation was in 1933. I'd say they were dogmatists or emotionalists or uninformed.

I don't say everything FDR did was right, just that more was bound to be done by government in the 1930s than today's libertarians would think right, or justified, or permissible.

It looks like we don't disagree that much, if at all. People couldn't be allowed to starve. And creating jobs projects was a way of giving men some dignity and getting them out of the house, rather than just giving them a check or a meal.

But the situation didn't justify the breadth and depth of intervention in the economy the the National Recovery Administration practiced. "Risk" is right: an "expiration date" should have been put on many of the New Deal policies. It is pretty clear that those who wanted a more powerful government exploited the Depression in ways that were regrettable, and FDR himself was too seduced by the prospect of greater power and glory for himself.

But some people in economics departments and think tanks don't always take psychology enough into account. A policy that would be appropriate to bring about recovery from a light recession probably wouldn't have worked in the 1930s. If people aren't convinced that the usual rewards and incentives for effort apply, then policies based on those rewards and incentives won't work. That's not to say that everything FDR did was right or that his policies should become a permanent standard, just that we have to be careful with economic arguments, when the outlook of one age differs so much from another.