Channeling FDR

The U.S. could have been out of the Great Depression by 1933, saving our parents and grandparents much grief. When you look at our recovery compared to Canada’s or some of the European nations, you see how FDR’s diddling and fiddling, setting up an alphabet soup of agencies to bring business under the heavy hand of the federal government, practically destroyed the country. The war didn't save us economically--we were pulling out of the FDR quagmire by 1941--but it took his eye off the ball, and he had to put his energies elsewhere. The rhetoric I hear today from Hillabama sounds like they’ve been channeling his speeches and ideas from the 1930s.

“Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, removed from the presidency an enormously shrewd and resourceful leader who had for the past decade expressed a hostility bordering on hatred for investors as a class. Many business people, among others, had feared that FDR harbored dictatorial ambition; some believed that he ultimately did exercise arbitrary power in some if not all areas—for instance, his unconstitutional “destroyer deal” of 1940 in which, without congressional approval, he gave away fifty warships of the U.S. Navy to a foreign power. His demise must have enhanced the confidence many investors felt in the future security of their remaining private property rights.”

"Regime uncertainty: Why the Great Depression lasted so long and why prosperity resumed after the War,” by Robert Higgs, Independent Review, vol. 1, no. 4, Spring 1997, pp. 561-590. Here.

Obama