Obama, Like FDR, Is Saving Capitalism from Itself—Ignore the New Hoovers
By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
In their floundering for something—anything!—with which to discredit Barack Obama's fiscal policies, conservatives (having waited until most of the Greatest Generation has died off and cannot laugh in their faces) are making the silly argument that Franklin Roosevelt's Keynesian policies didn't cure the Depression, and so we should embrace Herbert Hoover's laissez faire approach.
As an historian who has studied the New Deal—and is currently hip deep in accounts of the depressions of the late 19th century—I'd suggest that Obama, like Roosevelt, is in the process of saving capitalism from its inevitable excesses, and that conservatives should be grateful. Or, if not grateful, at least honest in their appraisal, as conservative commentators like David Brooks and Kathleen Parker have been in recent columns. We are a long way from socialism, folks.
As for resurgent Hooverism, Jonathan Chait, in a long well-reasoned piece in the New Republic, dismantles that canard quite effectively. I recommend it to you.
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Tags: politics | Barack Obama | Franklin Delano Roosevelt | conservatives | J. Edgar Hoover
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Reader Comments
Do Some Research You Pompous Jackass!!!!
You're entire premise is WRONG!
Herbert Hoover was NEVER laissez-faire. He instituted many of the same policies FDR did in his administration. Herbert Hoover was a progressive in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. FDR was less of a progressive visionary, and more a true follower of Herbert Hoover. Minimum wage, farm subsidies, tariffs and a hatred of capitalism. Hoover even denounced laissez faire capitalism in his book American Individualism. Hoover even tried to stimulate the economy much in the way FDR and Obama did with projects like the Hoover dam.
I could go on and on explaining why keynesian economic theory is retarded and doesn't work, but I'd take up too much time. To save time let me offer one example from history. Calvin Coolidge. He WAS a laissez-faire president. He vetoed subsidies, kept regulation low and often remarked about how the government has no place in people's businesses. He presided over the Roaring 20s! Now look at the Keynesians Hoover and FDR. They presided over the greatest period of economic depression and unemployment in US history. Even if you believed FDR's policies helped, compared with solutions from free marketers, there's no contest on the effectiveness of the latter and the incompetence of the former.
FDR took 10 years before he got the economy under control and that was only due to him abandoning his regulations during WWII. Reagan's recession in the 1980s started out bad but it ended in 1-2 years. Reagan fixed the economy in less than 1 term and ended his presidency with 18 million new jobs. FDR took 4 terms to do it, with his first 2 terms with no results at all!
Read a book you idiot!
Underforming hypocrits.
The republicans are going to trash anything and everything President Obama tries to do to help our country. They have no solutions, no workable ideas and are greatly responsible for bringing our country to it's knees, but continue on oblivious
to the needs of the American voters and our once great nation.
To put party over survival is criminal.
They are self destructing and it could not happen to anymore
deserving politicians.
One more thing
Mr. Farrell, who started social security? If that isn't one big Ponzi scheme I don't know what is. The kicker is that it is based on the backs of the worker in the past to pay for the retired of the future. What happens when there are less and less funds to draw from, or as in our case borrow from? Socialism does not work and that is why this system is failing. Government does not produce anything, but rather restricts, inhibits and redirects to achieve their goals. A middleman who seperates us from our rightful earnings. Facism.. Socialism.. call it what you like it is wrong!
Not quite as wrong as rong of CA is. That man or woman is just plain stupid!!
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