FDR Again

        I don’t know where John Kretzer grew up, (Yuma Sun, January 11, 2016) but his childhood sounds a lot like mine, a simple life, no electricity, no running water, neighbor helping neighbor, whole families gathering at first this farm and then that one, canning corn, helping with the harvest   And I quite liked the PBS special on Roosevelt.  He was a remarkable, fascinating man. His greatest strength was the way in which he united the country.  With him we thought anything was possible. I remember carefully peeling the foil off of every gum wrapper I found, knowing that somehow I was helping to win the war.

           I simply disagree with FDR’s leadership philosophy.  Interestingly enough, I don’t think he agreed with that leadership style either until after he became president.  On the campaign trail he decried every interventionist act Hoover had taken and promised to reduce government spending by 25 per cent, to ensure a sound gold currency, to end the extravagance of Hoover’s farm programs, to remove government interference in the affairs of private industry.  The problem with power is that it a potent brew.  Leaders often lose their sense of humility and start believing they can solve all our problems. 

         Both John and James Sefkac ( Yuma Sun January 7, 2016) need to check out the graphs at “Macro Trends.”  They show, definitively the response of the stock market to government intervention.  By March of 1930 it had recouped half of what it lost in 29.  Hoover signed Smoot Hawley in June and boom!  The bottom dropped out again.  It struggled back and looked better by April of 32, but Hoover signed the Revenue Act in June which more than doubled the income tax, and boom! Again.    

      Within the first 100 days of FDR’s presidency he had confiscated the people’s gold and devalued the dollar by 40 per cent.  He called for a nationwide bank holiday and 5000 of the banks he closed never opened again.  He passed a minimum wage law.  Boom! Boom!  Boom!  The National Industrial recovery act in 1933.  Boom! Tax rates at 90 per cent in 1934.  Boom!  The Civil Works Administration and when that didn’t work, The Works Progress Administration.  Boom!  Boom.  Like taking a sledge hammer to production and progress. 

         Battered at every turn, the economy would not recover to 1929 heights until 1959.   Left alone, the economy creates its own rhythm.  Our country has suffered an economic down-turn every 20 years since 1779.  Notice on the graph that only three times did it last more than two years, always in periods of intensive government intervention, under Hoover and FDR in the thirties, under Jimmy Carter in the 70’s, and most recently under George Bush and Barak Obama.  And don’t let the media trick you into thinking the depression is over.  The real unemployment rate is well over 25 per cent. 

     The intelligentsia think they must take care of the rest of us, but most of what the government does is detrimental to personal happiness and success.     

FDR and the Great Depression

        I recently disparaged Franklin D. Roosevelt suggesting he caused the Great Depression.  My friend was shocked.  “Who are your reading? Revisionists?  Funded by whom--the Koch brothers?”  Many economists dispute the FDR mythology: Gene Smiley, Milton Freedman, Benjamin Anderson, the entire Austrian School of Economics.  If they are funded by the Koch brothers, good for them. 

        Our federal government spends billions of dollars trying to convince the American people to worship the wizardry of an interventionist government   Our school textbooks include the historical revisionists. The first economist I listened to was my father. He recognized that federal agents raiding his farm, plowing up his crops and burying his livestock in the field was not smart economically.  We survived.  He hunted both in and out of season to keep meat on the table and did whatever he could, digging wells, sheering sheep, moving houses, selling skunk tails, in order to put clothes on our backs and shoes on our feet.

      America suffers severe economic down turns every 20 years. Historically the market corrects itself within 2 years.  The Great Depression lasted 12 years because everything the federal government did plunged it deeper into despair.

      It wasn’t greed, but the Fed bloating the money supply that caused the crash, and it was not the market crash that caused the depression, it was inept government policies. The Smoot-Hawley Act tripled tariffs, manufacturers couldn’t afford the raw materials and shut their doors.  Millions lost their jobs. It started a disastrous trade war.  Other nations refused to buy American goods and the agricultural industries went into a tailspin.

       Roosevelt increased government spending by 80 per cent, raised income taxes to 90 percent, imposed banking rules closed thousands of banks.  (Not one closed in Canada.). His national minimum wage law forced inexperienced and unskilled workers out of the job market.

       The NIRA put the government, fascist like, in control of industry Government hacks stormed through industrial districts with axes, breaking down doors looking for violators of a boondoggle of codes and rules and regulations. Within months’ industrial production dropped by 25 per cent.

          The CWA and then the WPA put millions to work but 99 per cent of it was piddling around.  My friends have fathers who praise Roosevelt because he gave them a job.  What they don’t realize is that his administration stifled industry and trade and prevented them from getting real jobs that produced wealth.

WWII put Roosevelts attention elsewhere, and the country revived.

Churchill on Socialism

         Churchill said, “Socialist policy is abhorrent to the idea of freedom.  It is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the abject worship of the state.  No socialist government could afford to allow free sharp expressions of discontent.  It cannot succeed without a vast bureaucracies of civil servants who are no longer civil and no longer servants.”   

       He did not believe that any administrative class, however educated, could be trusted with the kind of power that he feared it would gather, the kind that the doctrines of socialism and scientific historicism justified and required. The members of that class would still be human, and men are not angels.

Christianity and Happiness

       I love you, too, Elaine, fond memories.  And I love arguing.  I taught for 50 years and felt it necessary to keep my personal opinions at bay.  Now that I am fully retired, I feel liberated, free to tell the truth as I see it. 

         I quite disagree that what is venomous and vile is in the eye of the beholder.  When the author accuses Christians of worshiping the idol of fear, their being defeatists, alarmists, prone to lazy stereotypes, freaked out over school prayer policy (Wait a minute isn’t that the atheists that freak out over crosses and prayers?) and blog rants (in a rather cruel blog rant), he definitely paints a picture of some decidedly miserable and unhappy people.  Look at the picture with which he chooses to illustrate the piece, a demon possessed maniac made up like a ghoul.

         And this is not true of Christians at all.  There have been at least 8 research projects done on the issue, all of which show that there is a positive relationship between religion and happiness.   Pacific Standard analyzed 877,000 tweets from 7500 very conservative Christians and more than a million tweets from 8700 Atheists. Using the computerized text analysis program Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count they concluded that “Christians express more happiness than atheists in everyday language.”