All Posts Tagged With: "New Deal"

Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939

By Wolfgang Schivelbusch Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling

1Jan2007 | | 0 comments | Continued

Which New Deal Program Had a Death Rate?

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was often hazardous to the health of the American economy. Sometimes it was even hazardous to the health of Americans. An example is Roosevelt ‘s almost-forgotten decision in 1934 to cancel the federal airmail contracts. Here is the story. Airmail service began in 1918, and the first such flights were done [...]

1Nov2006 | | 0 comments | Continued

Тhe Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever

The problem with the American welfare state, according to Cass Sunstein, is that it is too small. In this book the widely respected University of Chicago law professor argues that the federal government should guarantee Americans a broad range of “economic rights.” Sunstein organizes the book around the story of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 State of [...]

14Dec2005 | | 2 comments | Continued

When the Supreme Court Stopped Economic Fascism in America

Seventy years ago, on May 27, 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court said no to economic fascism in America.The trend toward bigger and ever-moreintrusive government, unfortunately, was not stopped, but the case nonetheless was a significant event that at that time prevented the institutionalizing of a Mussolini-type corporativist system in America. (Correction: Contrary to a statement in this column, young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps were not compelled to join.)

1Oct2005 | | 7 comments | Continued

Opponents of the "Crown Jewel"

There was a time when self-reliance wasn’t such a tough sell. Today, however, the thought of dismantling Social Security strikes most as somehow un-American. It is, after all, the “cornerstone of the New Deal.” It saved the poor and elderly from indigence and provided dignity in a monthly paycheck. Legend has it that 70 years [...]

1Sep2005 | | 1 comment | Continued

F. A. Hayek and The Road to Serfdom: A Sixtieth-Anniversary Appreciation

Sixty years ago this month, in March 1944, The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek was first published in Great Britain. For six decades it has continued to challenge and influence the political-economic landscape of the world. Hayek delivered an ominous warning that political trends in the Western democracies were all in the direction [...]

1Mar2004 | | 4 comments | Continued

California’s Apprenticeship Scam

In 1937 Congress and President Roosevelt enacted the National Apprenticeship Act (NAA), which, sadly, is still in effect. It enables “the [U.S.] Department of Labor to formulate and promote the furtherance of labor standards necessary to safeguard the welfare of apprentices and to cooperate with the states in the promotion of such standards.” Like most [...]

1Dec2003 | | 0 comments | Continued

A Tale of Two Brain Trusts

“A political war,” said Raymond Moley, “is one in which everyone shoots from the lip.”1 He knew what he was talking about. Moley was the organizer and unofficial leader of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust,” the coterie of close advisers and speechwriters who helped FDR win the election of 1932 and assisted in formulating many [...]

1Oct2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Sixteen-Trillion-Dollar Mistake: How the U.S. Bungled Its Priorities from the New Deal to the Present

The Sixteen-Trillion-Dollar Mistake is an interesting, but fundamentally flawed book. Those who share the author’s ideological position (more on that in a moment) will find the book a treasure-trove of information to support their preconceptions. Most people, however, will be hard-pressed to wade through the tome’s biased economic misconceptions. Jansson starts out innocently enough, writing, [...]

1Oct2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal

Most black people believe that history demonstrates the necessity of labor-market regulations on their behalf. The message of this book is that the one place of redress blacks (and other minorities) had against discriminatory state and federal economic regulations was the court system guided by the principles of what came to be called, and later [...]

1Sep2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America

The American boy of 1854,” Henry Adams observed, “stood nearer to the year 1 than the year 1900.” A major reason was the development of the corporation and the rise of the United States to a world power during the late 1800s. In Colossus, editor Jack Beatty, as his book’s subtitle suggests, looks at “how [...]

1Sep2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

Myths of the New Deal

A persistent myth in American history is that Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal created jobs during the Great Depression and helped the poor “forgotten man” who was thrown out of work. Almost every American history text echoes this myth in its pages. Irwin Unger, for example, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a book [...]

1Aug2002 | | 3 comments | Continued

Tyranny of Reason: The Origins and Consequences of the Social Scientific Outlook

Tyranny of Reason is an accessible work of Western intellectual history in the tradition of Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies, Leonard Peikoff’s The Ominous Parallels, and Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions. In this powerfully argued book, Yuval Levin, associate director at the Center for the Study of Technology and Society, traces the [...]

1Aug2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Constitution and the New Deal

Myths about U.S. history abound, and perhaps no era of our history has spawned more than the New Deal. The economic myths are well known: That the economic collapse was due to an innate flaw in the free-market system; that the Hoover administration adopted an unyielding laissez-faire policy that allowed the crisis to deepen; that [...]

1Jan2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

How War Amplified Federal Power in the Twentieth Century

This article is reprinted from the July 1999 issue of The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty. After surveying the Western world in the past six centuries, Bruce Porter concluded: “a government at war is a juggernaut of centralization determined to crush any internal opposition that impedes the mobilization of militarily vital resources. This centralizing tendency of [...]

1Dec2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace by John C. Culver and John Hyde

W. W. Norton & Company · 2000 · 608 pages · $35.00 Reviewed by Burton Folsom, Jr. Possibly the most prominent statist politician in America in the first half of the twentieth century was Henry A. Wallace—vice-president, secretary of agriculture, and candidate for president in 1948. In American Dreamer, former U.S. Senator John C. Culver [...]

1Sep2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Never-Ending Welfare Debate

Norman Barry, a contributing editor of Ideas on Liberty, is professor of social and political theory at the University of Buckingham in the UK. He is the author of An Introduction to Modern Political Theory (St. Martin’s Press). After a long struggle, a “revolutionary” welfare reform bill, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act [...]

1Mar2001 | | 5 comments | Continued
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