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Drawing from Amity Shlaes’ excellent new book The Forgotten Man, George Will notes that FDR’s policies were an economic failure but a political success.
It is particularly galling that Roosevelt’s statist policies were so harmful (as Chris Edwards has succinctly explained), yet he is portrayed as the man who saved the nation from unbridled capitalism:
Franklin Roosevelt’s success was in altering the practice of American politics. This transformation was actually assisted by the misguided policies — including government-created uncertainties that paralyzed investors — that prolonged the Depression. This seemed to validate the notion that the crisis was permanent, so government must be forever hyperactive.
…Roosevelt, however, made interest-group politics systematic and routine. New Deal policies were calculated to create many constituencies — labor, retirees, farmers, union members — to be dependent on government.
…Roosevelt implemented the theory that (in [Shlaes’] words) “spending promoted growth, if government was big enough to spend enough.” In only 12 months, just one Roosevelt improvisation, the National Recovery Administration, “generated more paper than the entire legislative output of the federal government since 1789.” Before Roosevelt, the federal government was unimpressive relative to the private sector. Under Calvin Coolidge, the last pre-Depression president, its revenue averaged 4 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 18.6 percent today. …In 1936, for the first time in peacetime history, federal spending exceeded that of the states and localities combined.
…[A]s Roosevelt demonstrated and Shlaes reminds us, compassion, understood as making the “insecure” securely dependent, also makes the state flourish.
I am in a total funk lately, too dispirited to even test-fire the latest upgrades to the Mogambo Arsenal Of Sheer Firepower (MAOSF), even though Mrs. Kravitz finally replaced her old bullet-riddled garage door with a shiny new one, making a tempting, convenient and very shiny target.
My poor attitude mostly has to do with how my golf game has gone all to hell since everybody started insisting that I play by the rules, but it was not helped by the fact that Total Fed Credit was down $4.7 billion last week, which indicates that money and credit are not being created with the usual irresponsible insanity by the Federal Reserve, which means a big change in trend, and over-stretched markets eventually take a very dim view of changes in trend.
Or maybe my dismal outlook is the result of foreigners owning so much of our future earnings, as their holdings of Treasury and agency debt stashed at the Fed went up for the zillionth week in a row, and with the latest purchase of $8.2 billion's worth of debt, this one bank account alone possesses $1.975 trillion's worth of our future!
Or maybe my dyspepsia is the result of the news that the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that personal income went up 0.4% in May, which sounds like good news, but if you read on, you learn that personal savings actually declined by a negative 1.4% in May! Yikes! In one month! A net loss of 1% of income!
Last week, I bemoaned New York Times columnist David Brooks's eagerness to have government impose force on others. He was promoting programs like "National Service." Why are many conservatives so eager to wield force? Conservatives used to complain when so-called liberals did that.
That same week I happened to interview filmmaker Michael Moore for "20/20." Moore wants government to monopolize health care. His new film, "Sicko," argues that Canada and France approach paradise because their governments provide health care and more. This brought him standing ovations in Cannes.
"But government is force," I said to him. He was incredulous.
Michael Moore: Why do you see it as force?
Me: Because government takes money with force from people and gives it to others.
Moore: No, it doesn't, actually. The government is of, by, and for the people. The people elect the government, and the people determine whether or not they'll allow the government to collect taxes from them.
Is it really necessary to explain that government is force? When the Salvation Army asks you for a donation, you are free to say no, and you suffer no consequences. When the U.S. government demands a tax return and a check on April 15, you can't say no and go about your business. You comply or face fines or imprisonment. Yes, you get to vote for candidates periodically. But having an infinitesimal say in who will coerce you doesn't change that fact that they are using force.
“Hollywood no longer offers entertainment. Instead, activism has replaced acting, and sermons have supplanted stories. Instead of a good yarn, you get a yawn. To fully appreciate what afflicts Hollywood—and the presidency, the academy, and the media—watch ‘Idiocracy.’ The film is a product of Mike Judge’s genius (Beavis and Butthead, anyone?), and was backed and then spiked by the idiots at 20th Century Fox. It is easily one of the smartest and darkest satires…”
Arnie Celnicker argues that the Federal Trade Commmision's challenge of Whole Food's merger with Wild Oats is justified by various "market nuances" (Letters, July 7). Among these is the fact that "financial markets have deprived Wild Oats of the capital to compete head on with Whole Foods" and the fact that consumer demand for organic foods is skyrocketing.
Is China trying to poison us, our kids, and our pets? Are Beijing’s communist hardliners waging some clever, clandestine, economic/military war against U.S. citizens? Now, before flatly dismissing the idea, consider that China freely admits a lengthy record of safety woes.
Check out yesterday’s Wall Street Journal for Pete’s sake. According to China’s own findings, almost 20 percent of Chinese goods fail to meet quality standards. 20 percent. Now, when you factor in that China was responsible for issuing the report, and that its China’s own quality standards that are at play here, one needn’t go out on a limb to reach the conclusion that safety problems are likely far more widespread than what’s being officially reported.
Some recent Chinese safety woes: poisoned pet food; baby diapers laden in excessive fungus, children’s toys with lead, a slew of foods tainted with high levels of bacterial contamination, poisoned toothpaste, etc.
There's nothing like live music, but let's hope some of these kids listening to the Live Propaganda concerts have at least some skeptical abilities intact. The musicians and politicians pushing this feelgood event are quite hypocritical -- i.e., Al Gore's outrageous electricity usage, Madonna's prduction of 485 tons of carbon dioxide in four months, the idea of rich, Western musicians calling for policies that will ensure the enduring poverty of poor folks.
There are two main branches of the sciences of human action: praxeology and history. History is the collection and systematic arrangement of all the data of experience concerning human action. It deals with the concrete content of human action. It studies all human endeavors in their infinite multiplicity and variety and all individual actions with all their accidental, special, and particular implications. It scrutinizes the ideas guiding acting men and the outcome of the actions performed. It embraces every aspect of human activities. It is on the one hand general history and on the other hand the history of various narrower fields. There is the history of political and military action, of ideas and philosophy, of economic activities, of technology, of literature, art, and science, of religion, of mores and customs, and of many other realms of human life. There is ethnology and anthropology, as far as they are not a part of biology, and there is psychology as far as it is neither physiology nor epistemology nor philosophy. There is linguistics as far as it is neither logic nor the physiology of speech.[1]
In April 1979, 64 percent of the black citizens of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) lined up at the polls to vote in the first democratic election in the history of that southern African nation. Two-thirds of them supported Abel Muzorewa, a bishop in the United Methodist Church. He was the first black prime minister of a country only 4 percent white. Muzorewa’s victory put an end to the 14-year political odyssey of outgoing prime minister Ian Smith, the stubborn World War II veteran who had infamously announced in 1976, “I do not believe in black majority rule–not in a thousand years.” Fortunately for the country’s blacks, majority rule came sooner than Smith had in mind.
Think about those big scary trucks that sandwich you on the Great Canadian Highway. In Ontario those big scary trucks are now going to have speed limiters on them. The Ontario Government is mandating that the trucks will not be able to go above 105 clicks per hour. You now feel safer. How will you feel when some day you are driving a car that understands the meaning of the word torque and you're told by the government, in the name of fighting climate change, street racing and all other important issues that you can put the "pedal to the metal" but the puppy won't go any faster than 105. And please don't even think of screaming dinosaur words like personal freedom. You will be told, " Hey Dino. Park your macho in the museum. Your speeding days are history." I'm Charles Adler
Just about the most difficult lesson for first-year economics students, and sometimes graduate students, is that economic theory, and for that matter any scientific theory, is positive or non-normative. You might ask, "What's this business about positive and normative?" It's easy. Positive statements deal with what was, what is or what will be. Normative, or subjective, statements deal with what's good or bad, or what ought to be or should be. Confusing the two leads to considerable mischief.
The statement "Scientists cannot split the atom" is a positive statement. Why? If there's disagreement with the statement, there are facts to which we can appeal to settle the disagreement -- just visit Stanford University's linear accelerator and watch atoms being split. The statement "Scientists shouldn't split the atom" is a normative statement. Why? There are no facts whatsoever to which we can appeal to settle any disagreement. One person's opinion on the matter is just as good as another's.
How about the statement "Gasoline prices are unreasonable"? If some think they're reasonable while others don't, the argument can go on forever without resolution because there are no facts to which we can appeal to settle the disagreement. However, there are facts that tend to back up the statement: Buyers of gasoline prefer lower prices while sellers prefer higher prices.
When my research assistant and her husband took my wife and me to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, I was impressed when I heard her for the first time speak Chinese as she ordered food. My assistant was born and raised in China, so I should have been impressed that she spoke English. But I took that for granted because she always spoke English to me.
We all have a tendency to take for granted what we are used to, and to regard it as somehow natural or automatic -- and to be unduly impressed by what is unusual. Too many Americans take the United States for granted and are too easily impressed by what people in other countries say and do.
