
 |
|
Nov. 6, 2009
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How
to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Nov. 5, 2009
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking
Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker
With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater?
With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change
With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Oct. 29, 2009
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our
Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
JWisdom.com Why what we wear
impacts who we are
With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love
With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks
With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness
with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really?
By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A
Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious
By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things
By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices
By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 15, 2009
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
|
| |
Jewish World Review
Nov. 28, 2008 / 1 Kislev 5769
About that New New Deal
By
Mona Charen
| 
|
|
|
|
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
"This is the best deal since 1932." So said House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) regarding the increased public appetite for government intervention in the economy. Incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel echoed the sentiment when he told the Wall Street Journal, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."
Oh, boy. While Barack Obama's appointments so far have been fairly moderate, other Democrats are whistling "Happy Days are Here Again" and dusting off their wish lists for federal spending. "The House and Senate Appropriations committees hope to use December to negotiate a $410 billion omnibus measure that can be swiftly approved when the new Congress convenes," reports the Politico. Wasn't it just two months ago that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi supposedly outraged that the Congress was being asked (by Bush and Paulson) to pony up $700 billion to prevent a total freeze of credit markets around the globe intoned "SEVEN HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS." She repeated it for emphasis: "Madame Speaker, when was the last time anyone ever asked you for SEVEN HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS? It's a staggering figure."
But that was then. Now the cover of TIME magazine features Obama as FDR and the term "new New Deal" is on everyone's lips. Columnist Paul Krugman is fine with that, except he objects that Roosevelt didn't do enough!
The conventional wisdom has had a rough time of it lately among scholars. You know the fairy tale. You were probably taught it in school. During the 1920s, America practiced laissez-faire economics. The 1920s were seen, as historian Amity Shlaes put it, as a period of "false growth and low morals." Greedy businessmen got out of control and created a market crash in 1929. President Hoover, obedient to Republican ideas concerning noninterference in the market, did nothing. The economy spiraled into a depression. Roosevelt was elected in 1932, banished fear, inaugurated the New Deal, and put America back to work.
A series of recent books has demolished the myth. Some of Roosevelt's reforms were salutary (the Securities and Exchange Commission, reform of the Federal Reserve) but the New Deal's chief object was never achieved it did not solve the nation's unemployment problem. The CATO Institute's Jim Powell points out in "FDR's Folly," "From 1934 to 1940, the median annual unemployment rate was 17.2. At no point during the 1930s did unemployment go below 14 percent. ... Living standards remained depressed until after the war." Stanford University history professor David Kennedy has acknowledged, "Whatever it was, the New Deal was not a recovery program, or at any rate not an effective one."
Amity Shlaes' "The Forgotten Man" reminds us that FDR was a class warrior with a vengeance, always at pains to pin the nation's ills on "economic royalists" who had, he claimed, depressed wages, fixed prices, and conspired to keep all of the nation's wealth in their own greedy hands. FDR's war on businessmen (which featured not just rhetorical but actual criminal prosecutions) spread fear and timidity throughout the entrepreneurial sector. Shlaes writes, "The New Yorker magazine's cartoons of the plump, terrified Wall Streeter were accurate; business was terrified of the president. But the cartoons did not depict the consequences of that intimidation: that businesses decided to wait Roosevelt out, hold on to their cash, and invest in future years."
It is only recently that the New Deal myth has really taken hold. At the time there was less pretense. In "New Deal or Raw Deal?" Burton Folsom of Hillsdale College quotes Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. Testifying before the House Ways & Means Committee in May of 1939, the FDR ally and acolyte did not sugarcoat it:
"We are spending more money than we have ever spent before and it does not work. … I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises … I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started … and an enormous debt to boot."
On balance, the New Deal damaged the nation profoundly by extending and deepening the Great Depression. No other downturn in American history lasted so long or afflicted so many.
So no repeats, thank you very much.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Comment on JWR contributor Mona Charen's column by clicking here.
Mona Charen Archives
© 2006, Creators Syndicate
|
|

Arnold Ahlert
Mitch Albom
Michael Barone
Dave Barry
Tony Blankley
Andy Borowitz
David Broder
Stratfor Briefing
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Suzanne Fields
John Fund
Frank J. Gaffney
Lloyd Garver
Jonah Goldberg
Julia Gorin
Jonathan Gurwitz
Paul Greenberg
Lewis Grossberger
Victor Davis Hanson
Betsy Hart
Nat Hentoff
David Horowitz
Laura Ingraham
Cheri Jacobus Jeff Jacoby
Paul Johnson
Jack Kelly
Ed Koch
Ch. Krauthammer
Michael Ledeen
John Leo
David Limbaugh
Kathryn Lopez
Rich Lowry
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
Dick Morris
Bill O'Reilly
Jim Mullen
Clarence Page
Kathleen Parker
Dennis Prager
Wesley Pruden
Tom Purcell
Jonathan Rauch
Celia Rivenbark
Robert Robb
Cokie & Steve Roberts
Pat Sajak
Debra J. Saunders
Culture Shlock
Roger Simon
Michael Smerconish
Thomas Sowell
Mark Steyn
John Stossel
Cal Thomas
Bob Tyrrell
Diana West
Dave Weinbaum
George Will
Walter Williams
Byron York
Mort Zuckerman

Robert Arial
Chuck Asay
Baloo
Chip Bok
Dry Bones
Lisa Benson
John Branch
Gary Brookins
John Cole
J. D. Crowe
John Deering
Brian Duffy
Everything's Relative
Mallard Fillmore
Jake Fuller
Bob Gorrel
Joe Heller
David Hitch
Jerry Holber
Steve Kelley
Jeff Koterba
Dick Locher
Chan Lowe
Ranan R. Lurie
Jimmy Margulies
Rick McKee
Michael Ramirez
Kevin Siers
Jeff Stahler
Ed Stein
Danna Summers
John Trever
Gary Varvel
Kirk Walters

How 2
Lori Borgman
The Savvy Consumer
Elder matters
Fixit
Dr. Peter Gott
GET A JOB! by Marty Nemko
Richard Lederer
Tech Maven
Every Monday Matters
Nutrition Myths
Bookmark These
Bruce Williams
How Stuff Works
|