Free Republic

The last couple weeks may well be a harbinger of things to come, as the people Obama promised to tax heavily continue to pull out of the market. On November 4, the Dow closed at 9,625; today, it was at 8,497. That means that the market has lost nearly 12% of its value since Obama became President-elect. Hardly a measure of confidence. The market spoke rather clearly on November 5: NEW YORK, Nov 5 (Reuters) - Wall Street hardly delivered a rousing welcome to President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday, dropping by the largest margin on record for a day following...

The death and rebirth of American liberalism both began with flags in Grant Park. On Aug. 28, 1968, 10,000 people gathered there to protest the Democratic Convention taking place a few blocks away, which was about to nominate Lyndon Johnson's Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, thus implicitly ratifying the hated Vietnam War. Chicago mayor Richard Daley had warned the protesters not to disrupt his city and denied them permits to assemble, but they came anyway. All afternoon, the protesters chanted and the police hovered, until about 3:30, when someone climbed a flagpole and began lowering the American flag...

The historical model that the Democrats are choosing to hold up as they ponder our financial crisis isn't Harry Truman's Fair Deal or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. It is Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. At least three economic reforms under discussion now were also central in the New Deal package. Trouble is, these reforms didn't necessarily work well when they were first tried - and some failed outright. Consider, for starters, a stimulus package. President-elect Obama has said that "the one thing I can say with certainty is that we are going to need a stimulus package passed either before...

In 1932, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president as the nation was heading into a severe recession. The world's economy was slowing down, and all economic indicators in the U.S. showed signs of trouble. The new president's response was to restructure the economy with the New Deal -- an expansion of the role of government once unimaginable in America. We now know that FDR's policies likely prolonged the Great Depression because the economy never fully recovered in the 1930s, and actually got worse in the latter half of the decade. And we know that FDR got away with it...

God bless those Democrats. They're so nostalgic. This is not a new Great Depression, but if we all try hard enough, we can make it one! They long to take us back to yesteryear, when financial collapse ushered in an era of solidarity and equality. We were all in this together. All together in the crapper, but we were all together. Ah, what a time it was: Hobos huddled around open fires down at the rail yard, bankers were jumping out of windows, and we spent more time at home with family because we had no money to feed our...

Review: The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes By Lil Tuttle What happens if government intervenes in a nation’s economic crisis and makes it worse? Amity Shlaes tells such a story in her book, The Forgotten Man: a New History of the Great Depression (HarperCollins). School children are generally taught this standard history lesson about the Great Depression: The 1920s was a period of false growth, high living and low morals brought to a halt by the 1929 stock market crash. The crash led to crippling inflation and the nation’s economic collapse. President Franklin D. Roosevelt took control and ushered...

The stock market has not run into problems because the government hasn't done enough to support the financial system. It has fallen off a cliff because monetary and fiscal authorities are doing the wrong things. America's two most powerful economic officials, both unelected, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, embrace a 21st - century "New Deal," when our problems cry out for economic Darwinism. The Paulson - Bernanke prescriptions are the problem and the stock market knows it.

With visions of a massive liberal majority in the next Congress and the power to remake economic policy for the next generation, Democrats are dusting off their New Deal history books and openly discussing the idea of re-engineering Depression-era agencies for the 21st century. Several lawmakers want to bring back the Home Ownership Loan Corp., and others have discussed resurrecting the defunct Reconstruction Finance Corp., a federal program that made direct loans to businesses. Others see a lame-duck stimulus bill less as a short-term cash infusion for the economy and more as a long-term, government-driven jobs creator — a kind...

wo UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. 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 law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years. "Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10-...

President Bush will speak in a few minutes. Get to a TV and watch it, if you have the stomach for it.

What we really need is a new New Deal: a systematic approach to the financial and economic problems of the U.S. Firstly, we need relief for ordinary Americans. At the moment, four million households are behind on their mortgage payments and facing foreclosure. Some estimates suggest that an additional two million may face eviction next year.

America Needs A New New Deal By KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL and ERIC SCHLOSSER The Bush administration has proposed the most expensive government spending plan in American history, allocating as much as $700 billion to a Wall Street bailout. The proposal was attacked by members of both parties, who immediately began negotiations to find an alternative. The Bush plan was not only a political blunder; it was also a complete repudiation of the administration's own economic policies. It could not be justified by any of the core beliefs governing free enterprise and the free market. As with the decision to invade...

This year marks the 75th anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the Emergency Conservation Act, which created the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps] and changed the lives of up to 4 million young men while reinvigorating a struggling nation. Events are being held across the country to pay tribute to the CCC's work from 1933 to 1942. [ ... ] Most the CCC boys, as they're still called, were 18 to 25 years old when they enlisted. To be eligible for the program, they had to be identified by the U.S. Labor Department as being on the "relief rolls," unemployed, physically...

June 20, 2008, 0:00 p.m. What’s the Frequency?New Deal narcissism and what FDR wrought. An NRO Q&A The New Deal celebrates its 75th anniversary this week. National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez checked in with New York Times bestselling author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, Amity Shlaes, to mark the occasion. Kathryn Jean Lopez: How are you celebrating the New Deal’s 75th? Amity Shlaes: I’m participating in the Roosevelt Reading Festival at Hyde Park Saturday! One of the people I will see there is Nick Taylor, author of his own book, American Made,...

Presidential Personality Cult Deconstructed by: Malcolm A. Kline, April 25, 2008 So many generations have been taught that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ended the Depression that it has become an article of faith for historians in and out of academia and, naturally, their media acolytes. “The life of Franklin Roosevelt has been well-analyzed through the lens of politics and policy,” the editors of U. S. News & World Report write in the April 28/May 5 issue of the magazine. “As the president who lifted the country out of economic despair and stood up to foreign military aggression, FDR offers historians...

Progressive Calls for Civics Education by: Bethany Stotts, April 11, 2008 Contrary to the assumption that curriculum reform is promoted by only by conservatives, a member of the progressive movement recently lamented that students were losing touch with their American heritage. “We need to care, the Progressive Movement needs to care that the fabric of civics education in our country essentially has been decimated,” said Andrea Batista Schlesinger at a recent conference on the New Deal. However, Schlesinger warned the audience to not tell anyone what she said, lest she be accused of being a neoconservative. “And this where I...

The Great Depression... hit in waves, making everyone feel helpless. First came the crash of the stock market, then the failure of the local banks, then the failure of larger ones, then joblessness, and more joblessness, and hunger. By the time the country elected Franklin Roosevelt on his New Deal platform in 1932, one in four was unemployed.... Overly efficient factories, [economists] said, were producing too many goods for a market that could not keep up. Factories therefore had to lay off workers. It all amounted to "vicious industrial Darwinism," as Nick Taylor terms it in "American-Made: The Enduring Legacy...

New Deal Expansions Explored by: Bethany Stotts, March 28, 2008 Professor Patrick Garry’s recently published An Entrenched Legacy blames the increasing level of judicial activism on the precedents established under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. As Accuracy in Academia previously reported, FDR’s economic policies had a harmful effect on poor African-Americans, lowering their status within the public sector and inflating African-American unemployment when compared to their white counterparts. Professor Garry’s thesis expands this criticism of the New Deal to condemn FDR’s court-packing scheme, which, he argues, influenced the Supreme Court to focus on individual rights protections instead of promoting overall...

Racially Stacked New Deal by: Malcolm A. Kline, February 28, 2008 Although academics routinely credit President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with ending the Great Depression, winning World War II and saving western civilization, the actual historical record does not augur in favor of any of these assertions. ... For one thing, Archie never used the N-word that Mr. Fireside Chat was all too comfortable with. Bruce Bartlett shows this side of the four-term president in his book Wrong On Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past. To be fair, unlike his mentor Woodrow Wilson, FDR did not act on these inclinations, although...

Alter's readers would never suspect that [FDR] scores as badly if not worse on the typical kinds of charges hurled against George W. Bush and his administration: militarism, ideological cabals, secrecy, lies and lying-us-into-war, unscrupulous punishment of political enemies, disrespect for the Constitution and our political traditions, run-amok Wilsonianism, special favors for Big Business, and, most of all, incompetence. As historian William Leuchtenburg documented in his essay "The New Deal as Moral Analogue to War," Roosevelt's presidency was drenched in martial metaphors and militaristic appeals to loyalty and unity long before World War II. The New Deal's Public Works Administration...

Moody's Investors Service voices concerns about the long-term creditworthiness of federal securities, citing exploding health care and Social Security obligations; Senator Clinton proposes a stimulus package that would expand entitlements to low-income Americans; Citigroup has to go abroad to find capital to cover losses that arose because of improper risk management: All these things are linked. Mrs. Clinton's program fundamentally misses the underlying dilemma. Our short-term economic difficulties are the result of bad private risk management of financial portfolios; our longer-term predicaments are bad risk management of federal entitlement programs. Unduly risky portfolios of private investments have been funded; enormous...

Although Senator Clinton evidently wants to impress everybody with her undisciplined creativity concerning how to spend our tax dollars, she is actually ignoring her oath to defend the Constitution. This is because she is ignoring that the federal government doesn't have the constitutional power to decide new ways to spend taxpayer's money in the first place. She is irresponsibly carrying on the unconstitutional federal spending policies of FDR. More specifically, FDR essentially talked the Supreme Court into ignoring the 10th A. protected power of the states and broadening the interpretation of the vaguely worded general welfare clause. He did do...

On May 7, 1933, just two months after the inauguration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New York Times reporter Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote that the atmosphere in Washington was “strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts, of Moscow at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan.…America today literally asks for orders.” The Roosevelt administration, she added, “envisages a federation of industry, labor and government after the fashion of the corporative State as it exists in Italy.” That article isn’t quoted in Three New Deals, a fascinating study by the German cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch....

A stranger stood at the gate of Hell And the Devil himself had answered the bell He looked him over from head to toe And said “My friend, I’d like to know What you have done in the line of sin To entitle you to come within?” Then Franklin D. with his usual guile Stepped forth and flashed his toothy smile. “When I took over in ’33, A nation’s faith was mine”, said he “I promised this and I promised that, And I calmed them down with a fireside chat. I spent their money on fishing trips And I fished...

THE ARGUMENT Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics. By Matt Bai. 316 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95. With the possible exception of the Republicans, is there a major political party more stupefyingly brain-dead than the Democrats? That’s the ultimate takeaway from “The Argument,” Matt Bai’s sharply written, exhaustively reported and thoroughly depressing account of “billionaires, bloggers, and the battle to remake Democratic politics” along unabashedly “progressive” (read: New Deal and Great Society) lines. Well-financed and influential groups ranging from the Democracy Alliance to the New Democrat Network to MoveOn.org may be taking over the Democratic Party,...

His name was Louis McHenry Howe, and he was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Karl Rove. Running through the various intemperate and seething remarks from liberal outposts at the departure of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove was a common theme. Rove, spluttered the Washington Post, was guilty of "working the anger points…that deepened the country's polarization…" My, my. Return with me now to those transformative days of the 1930s as the Democratic Party and the fortunes of Franklin D. Roosevelt were on the rise. For 72 years, Democrats had not fared well in elections against Abraham Lincoln and his...

The late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was a true liberal--a man who welcomed debate. Just before he died this winter, he wrote, quoting someone else, that history is an argument without end. That, Schlesinger added, "is why we love it so." Yet concerning Schlesinger's own period of study, the 1930s, there has been curiously little argument. The American consensus is Schlesinger's consensus: that FDR saved democracy from fascism by co-opting the left and far right with his alphabet programs. Certainly, an observer might criticize various aspects of the period, but scrutiny of the New Deal edifice in its entirety is something...

If you have any doubts government-mandated minimum-wage laws kill jobs for the poor rather than lift them out of poverty, just take a look at what is happening right now in American Samoa. The latest minimum-wage law passed by Congress calls specifically for hikes in the U.S. territory – 50 cents a year annually until the continental rate of $7.25 is reached. This Washington-knows-best, one-size-fits-all approach is killing jobs in Samoa already – just days after it was signed into law by President Bush last Friday. StarKist had planned to expand its tuna production next month by hiring some 200-300...

March 2007 “Roosevelt’s or Reagan’s America? A Time for Choosing” John Marini University of Nevada, Reno John Marini, a professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno, is a graduate of San Jose State University and earned his Ph.D. in government at the Claremont Graduate School. He has also taught at Agnes Scott College, Ohio University and the University of Dallas. He is on the board of directors of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy and a member of the Nevada Advisory Committee of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Dr. Marini is...

Until 1933, the U. S. dollar was the among the strongest and most stable currencies in the world. With the stroke of a pen, President Franklin Roosevelt torpedoed it. We are still plagued with the resulting inflation. All governments lust for taxpayers’ money. The ability to direct the expenditure of large sums of money confers great power upon political leaders. But the spending requirements that President Franklin Roosevelt had in mind upon taking office in 1933 were of extraordinary dimensions. Inflating the currency, in socialist theory, was a way to create more money for that end. In the 1920s, after...

If you look at my home page, you will see that I rank FDR third behind Lincoln and Washington, and ahead of Reagan and TR in my list of our greatest presidents. Now, someone took me to task for that choice on an unrelated thread, which led me to pen this piece that I now throw out there for your review and comments. In my younger, more brash days I would have dismissed FDR because of his socialist policies. And Yalta. And the supreme court-packing try. Sure, he had his faults, like all presidents. Yet he is - along with...

THE White House is expected to announce a reconstruction package for Iraq as part of a plan for a “surge” of up to 30,000 troops into Baghdad when President George W Bush unveils America’s new strategy next month.Bush is being urged to give up to $10 billion (£5.1 billion) to Iraq as part of a “New Deal” that would create work for unemployed Iraqis, following the model of President Franklin D Roosevelt during the 1930s depression. At the Pentagon, the joint chiefs of staff are insisting on reconstruction funds as part of a package of political and economic measures to...

Many people believe that government and business are warring factions, and that political parties typically align with one or the other. But the truth, as Timothy P. Carney points out in his new book, is that big business is often in bed with big government and that both Republicans and Democrats have helped forge a partnership that consistently rips off ordinary Americans. Carney's new book, The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money, exposes this nasty partnership in detail—from Boeing subsidies to Ethanol mandates—and shows just how taxpayers lose their money and their voice in Washington....

Nearly every accident investigated by forensic teams proves to have been caused by a series of seemingly small, individually survivable mistakes which, if left isolated to burn themselves out, would not have caused the actual conflagration. Military, law enforcement and business interests have learned, under the pain of great cost to themselves, to establish 'break points'- the clear cut fire lanes of operational safeguards- in the chains of events which lead to losses. Looking at these sequences of events, later, from the comfort of our Lazy Boy recliners, it is wrenching to realize that if only a few, (or sometimes...

IT HAS now become less politically risky for Democrats to accept gay marriage than to support taxing the richest 1 percent of Americans. And that reality speaks volumes about the Democratic dilemma. On Wednesday, Senate Republicans offered a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage that they knew had no chance of passage. Their purpose was simple and cynical: Rally the faltering Republican hard-core base, and force a vote that they hoped would embarrass Democrats. The constitutional measure, which required 67 votes to pass, got only 49. Just one Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, supported it. Seven Republicans, including all five New...

The work of harvesting sugarcane is grueling - even worse than picking cotton. With a knife, a cutter slices the cane stalk as close to the ground as possible. Standing in wet, soft muck soil, he chops off the leaves and the top of the stalk, tossing the cane into a pile. He does this thousands of times a day - stooping, cutting, standing, cutting, stacking, stooping. To guard against the sharp leaves and the swinging knife, cutters wear aluminum shields on their wrists and legs, as well as many layers, even in the hot Florida sun. Given those conditions,...

BEIJING -- Communist leaders have launched China's most ambitious initiative in decades, promising billions of dollars in social spending and farm aid to help the 800 million people in its neglected countryside catch up with its booming cities. The blueprint unveiled at this week's parliament meeting echoes President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal of the 1930s, and is aimed at easing tensions over the growing gap between China's rich and poor. But Beijing faces daunting challenges making it work in the countryside, where their control over local leaders is limited, abuses are common and anger at corruption and land seizures...

For the first time in our history, we are regularly spending more than we make. People are not just saving less of their income, they are spending their savings. This disastrous, hedonistic proclivity was ordained by liberal/Progressivism. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s began the process of killing traditional moral values. Among the victims was the idea of saving for a rainy day, the virtue of thrift, Ben Franklin’s “a penny saved is a penny earned.” Young people since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth had been raised with the admonition to spend only after working hard and saving more...

In "The Age of Anxiety," Haynes Johnson makes a depressing observation: "Although McCarthy and the leading players of his time… have long since passed from the scene, McCarthyism remains a story without an ending." ...McCarthyism... has become an all-purpose incantation, referring to everything from genuine political repression to folks not buying a singer's records.... Calling someone a McCarthyite has become a form of McCarthyism. ...Mr. Johnson ignores the genuine threat that communist spies posed to the U.S.; he elides the justified anticommunist efforts of the 1930s and 1940s with the abuses of McCarthyism; and he compares McCarthyism with modern-day conservatism....

Now it begins: America's biggest relief and recovery program since the New Deal. And the omens aren't good. It's a given that the Bush administration, which tried to turn Iraq into a laboratory for conservative economic policies, will try the same thing on the Gulf Coast. The Heritage Foundation, which has surely been helping Karl Rove develop the administration's recovery plan, has already published a manifesto on post-Katrina policy. It calls for waivers on environmental rules, the elimination of capital gains taxes and the private ownership of public school buildings in the disaster areas. And if any of the people...

Now I realize that private charity would do much more -- if government hadn't crowded it out. In the 1920s -- the last decade before the Roosevelt administration launched its campaign to federalize nearly everything -- 30 percent of American men belonged to mutual aid societies, groups of people with similar backgrounds who banded together to help members in trouble. They were especially common among minorities. Mutual aid societies paid for doctors, built orphanages and cooked for the poor. Neighbors knew best what neighbors needed. They were better at making judgments about who needs a handout and who needed a...

Minneapolis Freepers! I'll be speaking for the Center for the American Experiment next week in your city. *On Thurs. 9/15 I'll be at St. Olaf College in Northfield at 10:15, and do a lunch there. *Same day, I'll do a reception at Providence Academy, Plymouth (6:00) and a lecture from 7:00-8:15 afterward. *Friday, 9/16, I'll be in Minneapolis for talks at St. Johns Juniversity in Collegeville at 10:15-11:30 and at 11:30-1:00 will do a lunch at St. Johns sponsored by Students Fostering Conservative Thought. Please come out, say hi, and I'll sign your copies of "A Patriot's History of the...

...[I]t was William Rehnquist who was most personally responsible for what is now called "the New Federalism" -- the revival of the ideas that judiciary should protect the role of the states within the federal system and enforce the textual limits on the powers of Congress. Establishing the New Federalism took enormous effort and leadership by Rehnquist over many years. Now that legacy is in jeopardy. At the founding, and for some 150 years thereafter, the limits on congressional power provided by the Constitution... as modified by the Fourteenth Amendment-- were enforced by the Supreme Court. According to the textual...

My engineering training kicked in when I saw the NASA photographs from space of New Orleans, and of the whole Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. There is an obvious solution to the New Orleans problem. The Dutch have already demonstrated it. Take New Orleans as the first and worst example. The pumps, levees and canals intended to protect New Orleans have been controlled by local authorities. They left three of the four pumping stations dependent on the local power grid. Hellooo. The precise time those pumps are most needed is during a storm when the local power grid...

Arizona Freepers: last heads up, cause I'm leaving early next week. I'll be at the Chandler Fashion Mall, Chandler, on July 31, 2:00-whenever, for a booksigning of "A Patriot's History of the United States" at the Barnes & Noble. Hope to see you there. Many of you have already written to say you'd come.

Goodness gracious, she dared say it and the New York Times – the voice of collectivism in the U.S. – and all its Marxist allies are aghast. An appointee to the federal judiciary, no less, dared to describe the New Deal for what it was: a socialist revolution. For this egregious offense she must be pilloried and cast into the outer darkness inhabited by those who offend the mighty Times, whose omniscience must never be questioned and before whom all right-thinking Americans must cower in humble obeisance. In retribution for her lese majeste, Justice Janice Rogers Brown – now, by...

I lived through the reign of Democrat icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His reign lasted from 1932 to 1994 when Republicans finally succeeded in wresting Congress from FDR's legacy. A legacy that worked for a uneducated, uninformed cabal of voters who blamed a Republican president for a flameout of the business cycle in 1929 as if no Democrats were involved in that debacle. History will not be kind to FDR. His Democrat apologists in the MSM will be dead, and the bare facts will remain. FDR's presidency was an economic disaster. He got credit for pulling the country out of a...

Janice Rogers Brown's life story is testimony to the triumph of intellect and will, the indomitability of the human spirit and the singular promise of America. Born to sharecroppers in Greenville, Ala., in 1949, Brown, who is black, spent her childhood under the brutal lash of Jim Crow. Against the odds, she has risen to occupy a seat on the California Supreme Court. Still, she does not belong on the federal bench. She is one of a handful of extremist judicial nominees put forward by President Bush but blocked, so far, by the U.S. Senate. And for good reason. She...

False Security By William Voegeli Posted April 26, 2005 We know at least two things about the Democratic Party. First, it is preoccupied with economic inequality. Implying that the middle class had somehow vanished, Senator John Edwards campaigned for a year with a showcase speech about two Americas, "one for people who are set for life, [who] know their kids and their grandkids are going to be just fine; and then one for most Americans, people who live paycheck to paycheck." Second, it is unyielding in its defense of Social Security—a defense that rejects the idea of reducing by a...

Last night the History Channel finished its two part series on the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Anyone have any thoughts?