Tuesday, December 18, 2007

The Forgotten Man

https://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Man-History-Great-Depression/dp/0060936428

I must admit that the combination of this book by Amity Shales with "The Myth of the Rational Voter" gives me some pause for future prospects. The ability of the left to ignore known information, especially in the areas of economics and business, while catering to natural class biases and fears of "the common man" is significant. Both are however excellent books which very much deserve to be read rather than just just the cliff note version.

The short version of "The Forgotten Man" (TFM) is that Hoover and others started the policies that would cause the depression in the late '20s by trying to reduce the money supply, raise taxes pass tariffs (Smoot Hawley), and increase Government control and projects (eg. Hoover Dam). Hoover and the Republicans started the descent, but FDR and the Democrats weakened and prolonged it by pushing the failed policies harder, and most damaging, actually attacking business and criminalizing individual business practices. In some cases, the rules were completely irrational, as in the NRA insistence on "straight killing" of chickens disallowing customer selection and differential pricing that went all the way to the Supreme Court in Schechter. When FDR and the New Dealers lost, he was furious and embarked on his "packing the court" attempt to circumvent the Constitution.

The degree to which the Democrats, the schools, and the MSM have propagandized the "New Deal", The Depression" and especially FDR himself is incredible. The spectacle of a very rich man "going after the rich" while sailing on his yacht may be the poster child case for "consistency is not an issue". By raising taxes, criminalizing business behavior after the fact and moving the Government into new areas (utilities, unions, pricing, etc), he managed to simultaneously reduce the prospective return for risk taken (by tax rate increases) while drastically INCREASING the risk on both the business front (regulation, government takeover, unions), but also add in the prospects of CRIMINAL PROSECUTION, even if the act was not "illegal" at the time it was done. An amazing combination of horrible policy, no wonder he managed to prolong the Depression until WWII forced him to change his policies so business could get busy and win the war.

A core of the book is this quote:
"As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering. A talks it over with B and A and B propose to get a law passed to to remedy the evil and help X. There law always proposes what A, B, AND C will do to help X. But what about C? There was nothing wrong with A and B helping X. What was wrong was the law and the indenturing of C to the cause. C is the forgotten man, the man who paid, the man who is never thought of."

FDR took if farther than that and tried to claim that X was the "forgotten man", and established the idea of buying the votes of X with the money of C. The producers that make the sacrifices and take the risks were expected to keep producing and to even increase production for less and less benefit as FDR and company tinkered with the economy at will and constantly demonized the very "rich" whom they depended on to power their redistribution schemes.

In a campaign speech at Madison Square Garden for his 2nd term FDR said:
"I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my 2nd administration that in it these forces met their master."
Not a lot of hubris in that is there? One gets a little glimpse of why God decided that man needed to be made mortal, no matter how impishly they might like to hold their cigarette. If FDR was such a "master", how come he's dead? One NEVER heard Ronald Reagan make such claims, yet his policies actually worked!

After FDR went too far for even his lefty supporters, and some of them started to criticize him, one of his cronies, Harold Ickes wrote the following in his diary that is a pretty good (though unintended) peek into the soul of the modern liberal:
"I often think that the definition of a liberal is a man who wants what is unattainable or who wants to reach his objective by methods that are so impracticable as to be self-defeating. So many liberals want merely to be in opposition. They do not want to advance from objective to objective."
So true, and one might add "Thank God"! If they went that extra little step of FDR and Ickes and completely ignored the Constitution, packed the court and took even more power, we would have no democracy left at all by now, only Government.
"Roosevelt also set out to prove that the intention of taxpayers who failed to complete complex returns correctly was malign: Where there was ambiguity, taxpayers ought to be presumed guilty. This was especially disingenuous of the president, for Roosevelt himself would submit an ambiguous tax return for the year 1937 ... with the note attached: "as this is a problem of higher mathematics, may I ask that they Bureau let me know the balance due?..."
How consistent. A liberal never expects his rules to apply to him, only to others.

The book is excellent, but scary. There are so many parallels to what we likely face going into '09. Bush mistakenly attempted to tack back to the middle like Slick Willie had done before him with the predictable result of derision from the middle to left and abandonment by the right. Now we will likely ride into a full Democrat controlled administration with everyone primed so that any disaster created can be "blamed on Bush" for a least the first two, and likely full four years of the first term.

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