Free Republic

Once upon a time a newly elected President, supported by an adoring media, claimed powers beyond the Constitution, and the Supreme Court acted. Does that Court still sit? Some of us are asking ourselves that question these days. A week doesn't pass when some new federal infringement on the rights of a free society is enacted or promoted. Just recently, Obama's Pay Czar, Kenneth Feinberg, cut the salaries of twenty-five senior Wall Street executives. By what Constitutional authority does he do that? we ask. While the Democratic Party seems hell bent on socializing as many parts of the free market...

Toward the end of a mostly sympathetic profile of the great journalist and critic H. L. Mencken, Christopher Hitchens once claimed that Mencken’s only “brilliance and verve” occurred during “the period between 1910 and the end of Prohibition.” Which is to say, before Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal came along. It’s an all too common refrain. Biographer Terry Teachout characterized Mencken as “blinded partly by his hatred of Roosevelt.” Mencken scholar Charles A. Fecher—whom you’d expect to know better—declared Mencken’s opinion of Roosevelt to be “maniacal—there is no other word to use.” Although it’s true that Mencken ended the 1930s as...

In 1932, FDR had an opportunity to change the conventional way that governments deal with a recession. His predecessor, Herbert Hoover, who also had a tendency towards central planning, had started the process. Instead of allowing markets to correct themselves as they had in all the previous panics, as depressions were then called, both men instituted programs of government intervention. Hoover signed the Smoot Hawley tariff even after many of the leading economists of the time personally implored him not to sign it. A tariff would help improve farm prices, which was a cornerstone of the progressive movement. He asked...

In 1937, faced with a Supreme Court that he saw as mulishly blocking his effort to rescue the country from the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared war on the justices — and on the whole notion of deferring to their interpretation of the Constitution. Nowhere in that document is it written that the court is the final arbiter of the Constitution’s meaning through judicial review. The court took for itself the power “to say what the law is” in the 1803 case Marbury v. Madison. A century and more later, Roosevelt protested. He told a colleague that when...

This Act follows FDR's March 5, 1933 chat on the "Banking Crisis", and effectively proves our president to be a liar and a thief. Interesting, too, that the gold is to be turned in to the privately-owned Federal Reserve Banks. James Turk furnishes an excellent analysis including the amount of gold actually surrendered by Americans. From: President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt To: The United States Congress Dated: 5 April, 1933 Presidential Executive Order 6102 Forbidding the Hoarding of Gold Coin, Gold Bullion and Gold Certificates By virtue of the authority vested in me by Section 5(b) of...

Roy Langbord had guessed that someone in his family might have hidden away a great treasure decades before, but not until his mother had him check a long-neglected safe-deposit box did he realize just how great it was. Inside the box, opened in 2003, he found an incredibly rare coin, wrapped in a delicate paper sleeve. It was a gold $20 piece with Lady Liberty on one side, a bald eagle flying across the other and, at Liberty’s left, the four digits that made it so valuable: 1933. The famous “double eagles” from that year were never officially released by...

NEW YORK – A government that is constitutionally required to offer each citizen a "useful" job in the farms or industries of the nation. A country whose leadership intercedes to ensure every farmer can sell his product for a good return. A nation that has the power to act against "unfair competition" and monopolies in business. This is not a description of Cuba, communist China, or the USSR until 1991. It's the vision of the future of the U.S, as mandated by a radical new "bill of rights" drawn up and pushed by President Obama's newly confirmed regulatory czar, Cass...

You owe your life — and everything else — to the sovereign. The rights of subjects are not natural rights, but merely grants from the sovereign. There is no right even to complain about the actions of the sovereign, except insofar as the sovereign allows the subject to complain. These are the principles of unlimited, arbitrary, and absolute power, the principles of such rulers as Louis XIV. Intellectuals have assiduously promoted them; think of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. A new intellectual champion of absolutism has now emerged. Mild-mannered University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has been advancing the...

Today, President Barack H. Obama appointed yet another “czar”, making the announcement at an AFL-CIO Laborious Day picnic in Cincinnati today; Ron Bloom will make the 33rd Obamic Czar, counting Van Jones, who just resigned but will surely be replaced with a less explosive (but every bit as Marxist) appointee, and after Obama taps someone else to fill Bloom’s old position as Car Czar. Thanks to Glenn Beck, who has done a bravura job of journalism, here are the Czars; entries in blue are those Czar positions created expressly by Barack Obama: Richard Holbrooke — Afghanistan Czar Jeffrey Crowley —...

One of the biggest myths about the great depression is that FDR's NEW Deal and the related government intervention and public works projects got us out of the Great Depression. The truth is that the New Deal did not work. Instead of creating growth in the private sector, it created government growth that squeezed out the private sector. Of course, the number one public golf course in the country Bethpage Black (where the US Open played this year) was a was a New Deal Federal works project, but that only cures MY depression, it did little for the country. As...

Yoshio Matsumoto was among the 110,000 Japanese-Americans seemingly bound for an internment camp soon after America entered World War II when a university he knew nothing about from a far off part of the country agreed to take him in.

  Once, when asked his philosophy, Franklin Roosevelt answered simply, "I am a Christian and a Democrat."   As always with Roosevelt, there was more to it than that. He was not just a Christian, but a Protestant, an Episcopalian, a descendant of Huguenot and Yankee New Englanders on his mother's side. And he was not just a Democrat, but a New York Democrat, whose leaders and most faithful voters were overwhelmingly Catholic, especially Irish Catholic. There was a tension, always, between this Protestant patrician and his Catholic party, a tension that this congenial country squire and shrewd politician...

Here is video of Presidential Historian Douglas Brinkley talking with Mike Huckabee about the fact that President Obama is now comparing himself with Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Brinkley believes Obama is running into problems because he is trying to pass a Health Care bill so soon after the huge Stimulus Spending Plan. The American people feel he is trying to do "too much too fast." . . . . (Watch Video)

Franklin D. Roosevelt “The Economic Bill of Rights” Excerpt from 11 January 1944 message to Congress on the State of the Union It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure. This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its...

“Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it” It speaks for itself!Libertas

TAMPA - The accusations come fast and furious on Web sites and talk radio: President Barack Obama is a socialist, a communist. Is he? Is his health care proposal socialist? "Yes. Next question," said Michael Steele, chairman of the national Republican Party, speaking to reporters in Washington on Monday. "He has surrounded himself with people that have been for the redistribution of wealth. That's part of the communist mindset," said Ted Webb, a rightist Tampa radio commentator. "'Communist' is not the correct word, and 'socialist' is debatable - the correct word is 'Marxist,'" said Rick Klepal, a Tampa commercial investment...

Now, if you just looked at the years 1933-1940 you might not even know that we were in a depression. In fact, from the period of 1933-1940 unemployment never reached single digits. In fact, by 1938 unemployment was still at 19%. GDP growth was solid all the way from 1933-1937. Of course, in order to recover from the economic contraction of 1929-1932, it was going to take more than merely "solid" growth. That's why despite what looked like solid GDP growth all throughout the Presidency of FDR we continued in a depression.

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.

A new article on Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies has been published by the Milken Institute Review. The piece reveals how FDR’s strengthening of labor unions contributed to the continued economic downturn experienced during the Great Depression and how the country’s disastrous economic condition was exacerbated by the failure of the New Deal. As time passes more and more honest economists and historians – those not sold out to Roosevelt sycophancy – are coming to terms with the simple fact that FDR was a failure as president with everything except his prosecution of WWII. Here is yet another historical review...

At times Barack Obama has compared himself and his policies to that of FDR, the President during the Great Depression.That is turning out to be a very valid and frightening comparison. The traditional social studies text book view is that Herbert Hoover turned a recession into the great depression, by sitting on his hind quarters doing nothing. Actually that is a result of political propaganda of Roosevelt and his administration. The Truth is that both Herbert Hoover and then FDR turned the recession into a depression by OVER-tinkering with the economy. They were like the Tim Allen character on Home...

One thing to remember is that while the depression that started in 1929 may have come to a bottom in 1933, it took a long time to recover...

“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...

Health care reform has a long history of failureJune 9, 3:52 PM Health care reform is on everyone’s mind. It’s an idea, they say, whose time has come. The cost of health insurance is out of control. 40 plus million Americans cannot afford or cannot qualify for health insurance. But health care reform has been here before. Actually, about every 15 years there is a push for reforming health care in America. It started way back in 1912 when Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party introduced a platform calling for national health insurance for industry. In 1934 as part of the...

As Allied troops were storming the beaches on D-Day, FDR was leading the nation in a prayer for victory. {video at site} Transcript below the fold. My Fellow Americans: Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our Allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far. And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer: (Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net ...

President Obama's "New Deal II" is the Raw Deal too, just as FDR's was. FDR did not bring us out of the Depression, quite to the contrary. He prolonged it. Using data collected in 1929 by the Conference Board and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, two UCLA economists, Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian, conducted a four-year study (in which they concluded that FDR's policies prolonged the Great Depression by seven years. The United States didn't climb out of the Great Depression until 1943, when our manufacturing plants were humming to meet both our own, as well as foreign military demand.

Although Barack Obama is often compared with FDR, the current president is actually more radical than was Roosevelt. That was among my comments when I appeared on a panel this morning on ‘Money For Breakfast’ on the Fox Business channel. Hosted by Alexis Glick, my fellow panelists were Elaine Chao, Labor Secretary‌ in the administration of Pres. George W. Bush, and Al Lewis, of Dow Jones Newswires. My argument on Obama being more radical than FDR was this: Roosevelt created the modern welfare state. Dubious as was that achievement, the change Obama would impose is even more fundamental. He seeks...

... [E]ven if another depression is next to impossible, there is still the danger that next year, or the year after, might turn into 1936. Let me explain. From its bottom in 1933 to 1936, the G.D.P. climbed spectacularly (albeit from a very low base), averaging gains of almost 11 percent a year. But then, both the Fed and the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt reversed course. In the summer of 1936, the Fed looked at the large volume of excess reserves piled up in the banking system, concluded that this mountain of liquidity could be fodder for future inflation,...

Millennials Need Jobs by: Bethany Stotts, May 13, 2009 As colleges’ new graduates attempt to enter the workforce this summer, their chances of finding a job in a down-turned economy seem bleak, especially for young men. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average unemployment in America was 8.9 percent for the month of April, but unemployment among youth between 20 and 24 years old averages 14.7 percent. More disturbingly, a full 17.5 percent of men in this age group are unemployed. Young women ages 20 to 24 do much better, with six percent less unemployment (11.5 percent) for their...

The trouble with many of the past ratings of America's presidents is that the "consensus" has been arrived at by academics who act alike, do alike, and think alike. In the view of many, they are suspect of viewing history exclusively through the prism of Ivy League faculty lounge discourse. Alvin Stephen Felzenberg (Ph.D.) — who has taken a fresh and comprehensive look at the nation's chief executives in his book The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game — does not challenge the credentials of the conventional historians. Rather, as he explains in...

Teachable Moments by: Malcolm A. Kline, May 07, 2009 Here’s a couple of history lessons you are not likely to get in school. The Depression That Wasn’tThe stentorian orator who as president saved America from the Great Depression in the first half of the last century was none other than—Warren G. Harding. “During and after World War I, the Federal Reserve inflated the money supply substantially,” historian Thomas E. Woods, Jr., writes in the May 4, 2009 issue of The American Conservative magazine. “Once the Fed finally began to raise the discount rate—the rate at which it lends to banks—the...

The Bush administration subjected us to a deluge of fiscal and monetary expansion, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1960s. The federal budget ballooned 112 percent from $1.86 trillion in 2001 to a projected $3.94 trillion in the current fiscal year. From a surplus of $128 billion in 2001, the federal budget is projected to be in deficit $1.752 trillion in 2009. The projected deficit in the current fiscal year is on par with the level of all federal expenditures in 2001. On top of this, the amount of the liquid money supply in the economy —...

In American politics, the symbolic and the concrete are seldom far apart. Consider the fanfare surrounding President Barack Obama’s 100th day in office. On the surface it seemed a classic instance of what the historian Daniel Boorstin once described as a “pseudo-event,” an exercise in public relations masquerading as news. “The celebration is held, photographs are taken, the occasion is widely reported,” Mr. Boorstin wrote of such staged episodes. The Obama administration itself took an equally jaundiced view at first. Robert Gibbs, Mr. Obama’s press secretary, promised that the 100th day, which fell on Wednesday, would be “not a ton...

n April 29, the U.S. will have survived the first hundred days of President Barack Obama. Of course, unemployment is up and the stock market is down, but the president's optimism is still unbounded. Mr.Obama's staff is encouraging writers to find parallels to FDR and his first hundred days as president 75 years ago during the Great Depression. Let's take the challenge: Here are three points of similarity between the two presidencies.

Inasmuch as Barack Obama fancies himself alternatively the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a closer perusal of FDR’s policies is in order. Beyond the disastrous New Deal, a massive expansion of government bureaucracy and spending which extended the length of the Great Depression; FDR’s dealings with the homicidal Joe Stalin are revealing.

WASHINGTON -- The Obama White House doesn't "subscribe to the legitimacy" of the 100-day metric for presidential progress, but is mighty satisfied with the new president's accomplishments...... the suggestion that Obama had been more productive than Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his first 100 days (the president whose scale of activity first generated 100-day assessments of subsequent presidencies) was left on the table. When asked if that was the proper interpretation, the adviser said Obama's had been the most productive since FDR.

WASHINGTON -- The Obama White House doesn't "subscribe to the legitimacy" of the 100-day metric for presidential progress, but is still mighty satisfied and well-versed it the new president's accomplishments. "This isn't Biblical," a senior White House adviser said of the 100-day marker. "You don't do 100 days and rest." Even so, this senior official, a long-time adviser to the president who spoke on the condition he not be quoted by name, said "you would be hard-pressed to find another administration that's done so much in such a short period of time. It's been a very productive 100 days." For...

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...

Lots to compare between the current situation and the situation during the depression of the 1930s.

This is a cartoon from the 1934 Chicago Tribune.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill sat stunned and silent in his study at 10 Downing Street when the news about his friend came just before midnight. Soviet Premier Josef Stalin was in his Kremlin office in the early morning hours and sat for a long moment, saying nothing, holding the American ambassador's hand who had just told him. And in Berlin, deep in his underground bunker, Adolph Hitler was telephoned by his propaganda minister, and was told: "My Fuhrer! I congratulate you. It is the turning point!" It was the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt— April 12, 1945. A...

For more than half a century, America’s political leaders — Republican and Democrat — have sought to wrap themselves in the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the man credited with replacing fear with hope and ending the Great Depression. But in recent years some writers and economists have been telling a version of this story that is quite different from the one generally taught in school or seen on the History Channel. In this interpretation Roosevelt is a well-meaning but misguided dupe who not only prolonged the Depression but also exacerbated it. ... Amity Shlaes, a syndicated columnist who works...

Barack Obama's optimistic campaign rhetoric has crashed headlong into the stark reality of governing. In office two months, he has backpedaled on an array of issues, gingerly shifting positions as circumstances dictate while ducking for political cover to avoid undercutting his credibility and authority. That's happened on the Iraq troop withdrawal timeline, on lobbyists in his administration and on money for lawmakers' pet projects. "Change doesn't happen overnight," Obama said at a town-hall style event in California on Thursday, seeming to acknowledge the difficulty in translating campaign pledges into actual policy. Asked by a campaign volunteer how his supporters can...

From: U.S. Coalition for Life To: International Pro-Life Community Date: January 30, 2009 Subject: MOD’s Early Anti-Life History (1968-1976) Dear Friend of Life,On April 26, 2009, the March of Dimes, the number one promoter of eugenic abortion in the United States, will be launching its annual walkathon, Walk America, recently renamed “March for Babies.”  Among the recently released files of the USCL is the MOD/Voss Memorandum titled “Pro-Life Agitation” released by the MOD National Office on March 16, 1976. The document spells out how the MOD used the Catholic bishops’ NCCB/USCC Family Life Office in Washington, D.C. to neutralize pro-life...

At first you may think, “That sounds reasonable. After all, who can really predict the future?” But then read DOJ’s next sentence: “This position is limited to the authority upon which the Government is relying to detain the persons now being held at Guantanamo Bay.” Turns out it’s not about the future at all. It’s about the people about whom we’ve had the better part of eight years to develop a position on what “substantial” assistance is and which “associated forces” are eligible for indefinite detention. Obama doesn’t want to say he is relying on Article II — even though...

Two UCLA economists are blaming the length of the Great Depression on President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who instead of being blamed has always been thought of as the main catalyst who brought the country out of the Depression. Instead, in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude that the New Deal policies FDR signed into law thwarted economic recovery for the country. See UCLA Newsroom. After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into...

Here is a video segment from last night's Hannity where Sean and Jonah Goldberg discuss what President Obama could learn from Franklin Roosevelt about how to handle the current economic crisis. An extensive clip of FDR speaking about the crisis of the banking system during the Great Depression is played and then discussed. . . . . . (Watch Video)

Burton Folsom, history professor at Hillsdale College and senior historian at the Foundation for Economic Education contends that FDR’s New Deal legislation was deeply flawed and is critical of Roosevelt's other political and economic plans as well as the former presidents personal life and legacy. This event was hosted by the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC.

Congressional Democrats Bankrupted the Nation *snip* The End In April 2001, before the events of 9/11 and just after entering the White House, President Bush began signaling warnings to members of congress that both Fannie and Freddie were headed into deep treacherous waters which could cause “strong repercussions in financial markets.” In early 2003, the Bush White House upgraded its warnings to “a systemic risk that could extend well beyond just the housing markets.” On September 10, 2003, Bush Treasury Secretary John Snow testified in congress that something had to be done to confront the growing storm at Fannie and...

Then the question which remains is, What ought Some-of-us to do for Others-of-us?" The Case of the Forgotten Man Farther Considered There is a beautiful notion afloat in our literature and in the minds of our people that men are born to certain "natural rights." If that were true, there would be something on earth which was got for nothing, and this world would not be the place it is at all. The fact is that there is no right whatever inherited by man which has not an equivalent and corresponding duty by the side of it, as the...