All Posts Tagged With: "FDR"

Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy

For decades the prevailing view among historians has been that because the American people were too stubborn and stupid to concern themselves with foreign wars, President Franklin Roosevelt had to lie for a noble cause—namely, waging war against imperialist Japan and Nazi Germany. Seldom have historians asked themselves why Americans would want to stay out [...]

30Nov2011 | Jim Powell | 5 comments | Continued

Unemployment: What’s To Be Done?

In Part 1 I outlined natural unemployment, government-caused unemployment, and the attempts to measure these. We saw how ambiguous and subjective some of the concepts of unemployment are and how the government, specifically the Federal Reserve, is charged with managing it. Now we turn to current conditions and what can be done about them. There [...]

30Nov2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 6 comments | Continued

The Infrastructure Delusion: Getting Nowhere Faster

Infrastructure does not an economy make. Highways and railroads, airports and seaports, communications towers and fiber-optic cables are essential for the flow of commerce, but it is the people, goods, and information moving over and through this infrastructure that are the heart of an economy. Overinvestment in roads, bridges, and airports means underinvestment in the [...]

26Oct2011 | Richard W. Fulmer | 12 comments | Continued

Walter Lippmann: The Impossibilities of Social Planning

At the beginning of the twentieth century, observed historian A. J. P. Taylor, a law-abiding Englishman’s conscious relations with the government were limited to his contacts with the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked, and if he wanted to travel abroad he could do so without [...]

21Sep2011 | Harold B. Jones Jr. | 2 comments | Continued

The Struggle to Limit Government: A Modern Political History

Today’s most crucial policy battles are about federal spending and the scope of government power. Cato Institute scholar John Samples reminds us in this book that those battles have their origins in the Progressive era, the New Deal, and the Great Society. Early in the twentieth century Herbert Croly (cofounder of The New Republic) argued [...]

24Aug2011 | Greg Kaza | 0 comments | Continued

Which Strategy Really Ended the Great Depression?

“World War II got us out of the Great Depression.” Many people said that during the war, and some still do today. The quality of American life, however, was precarious during the war. Food was rationed, luxuries removed, taxes high, and work dangerous. A recovery that does not make—as Robert Higgs points out in Depression, [...]

24Aug2011 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 6 comments | Continued

The Modern Union versus Workers’ Rights

The raging controversy in Wisconsin over eliminating collective bargaining “rights” for government employees cast a bright and harsh light on public-sector unions. Some commentators have distinguished public-sector unions from private-sector unions, but the vested interests of the two are much the same. Both are expressions of what might be called “the modern union,” which came [...]

22Jun2011 | Wendy McElroy | 4 comments | Continued

Private Investment and Public “Investment”

Politicians are fond of telling the public that we must “invest” in this program or that—be it education; health care; make-work infrastructure projects like the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere”; $50 million for an indoor rainforest in Iowa; $3.4 million for a tunnel to allow turtles to cross under a highway in Florida; $1.8 million for swine [...]

22Jun2011 | Adam B. Summers | 1 comment | Continued

Fear-Mongering and Servitude

In his 1776 essay, “Thoughts on Government,” John Adams observed, “Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.” The [...]

22Jun2011 | James Bovard | 33 comments | Continued

The Progressive Income Tax and the Joy of Spending Other People’s Money

On August 31, 1910, Teddy Roosevelt traveled to Kansas to make a stirring speech in support of a federal income tax. “The really big fortune,” Roosevelt said, “the swollen fortune by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men [...]

21Apr2011 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 5 comments | Continued

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal

The Great Depression ranks as one of the most misunderstood periods of history. For that, we can thank biased historians who for generations have favored activist government, along with Keynesian economists who never understood how the economy works. Since the last few months of 2008, the Great Depression has been thrust back into the national debate [...]

22Dec2010 | Raymond J. Keating | 3 comments | Continued

America’s Depression within a Depression, 1937–39

The Great Depression in the United States is generally dated as beginning in 1929 and ending in 1941, give or take a year. This has led many commentators to disregard or to pass quickly over the serious depression that began in 1937 and ended—if returning to the 1937 level can be considered a depression’s end—in [...]

22Oct2010 | Robert Higgs | 8 comments | Continued

The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America

It is a curious footnote in the history of the libertarian movement that three of its leading inspirations voted for Franklin Roosevelt for president. The irreverent H. L. Mencken voted as much against Hoover as he did for FDR. Ayn Rand, like many, bought into Roosevelt’s rhetoric of fiscal discipline. But Isabel Paterson knew better, [...]

9Jul2010 | Jude Blanchette | 0 comments | Continued

For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s

The latest New Deal synthesis is For the Survival of Democracy by veteran historian Alonzo Hamby of Ohio University. What makes Hamby’s research design different is that he describes the development of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal in an international context. Specifically, he weaves the American narrative with events in Britain and Germany in [...]

8Jul2010 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 0 comments | Continued

FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression

The Great Depression of the 1930s was by far the greatest economic calamity in U.S. history. In 1931, the year before Franklin Roosevelt was elected president, unemployment in the United States had soared to an unprecedented 16.3 percent. In human terms that meant that over eight million Americans who wanted jobs could not find them. [...]

6Jul2010 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 2 comments | Continued

Higher Income Taxes Are Benign?

In a recent issue of the online magazine Slate, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer attempts to debunk the alleged myth that higher taxes reduce growth. Spitzer opens with the undeniable truth that the “American debate over taxes is ferocious and highly partisan.” If only he had continued to state the obvious, we would not [...]

30Jun2010 | and and Jeb Bleckly | 11 comments | Continued

Comparing the Great Depression to the Great Recession

President Obama has often remarked that the Great Recession (2008–10) is the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. It’s interesting to study the many parallels between the Great Recession and the Great Depression. Causation. The main causes of both crises lie in actions of the federal government. In the case of the Great Depression, [...]

20May2010 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 47 comments | Continued
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