"Guess Who?"

by

Thomas Sowell

Guess who said the following: "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work." Was it Sarah Palin? Rush Limbaugh? Karl Rove?

Not even close. It was Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury under Franklin D. Roosevelt and one of FDR's closest advisers. He added, "after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . And an enormous debt to boot!"

This is just one of the remarkable and eye-opening facts in a must-read book titled "New Deal or Raw Deal?" by Professor Burton W. Folsom, Jr., of Hillsdale College.

Ordinarily, what happened in the 1930s might be something to be left for historians to be concerned about. But the very same kinds of policies that were tried-- and failed-- during the 1930s are being carried out in Washington today, with the advocates of such policies often invoking FDR's New Deal as a model.

Franklin D. Roosevelt blamed the country's woes on the problems he inherited from his predecessor, much as Barack Obama does today. But unemployment was 20 percent in the spring of 1939, six long years after Herbert Hoover had left the White House.

Whole generations have been "educated" to believe that the Roosevelt administration is what got this country out of the Great Depression. History text books by famous scholars like Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., of Harvard and Henry Steele Commager of Columbia have enshrined FDR as a historic savior of this country, and lesser lights in the media and elsewhere have perpetuated the legend.

Although Professor Schlesinger admitted that he had little interest in economics, that did not stop him from making sweeping statements about what a great economic achievement the New Deal was.

Professors Commager and Morris of Columbia likewise declared: "The character of the Republican ascendancy of the twenties had been pervasively negative; the character of the New Deal was overwhelmingly positive." Anyone unfamiliar with the history of that era might never suspect from such statements that the 1920s were a decade of unprecedented prosperity and the 1930s were a decade of the deepest and longest-lasting depression in American history. But facts have taken a back seat to rhetoric.

In more recent years, there have been both academic studies and popular books debunking some of the myths about the New Deal. Nevertheless, Professor Folsom's book "New Deal or Raw Deal?" breaks new ground. Although written by an academic scholar and based on years of documented research, it is as readable as a newspaper-- and a lot more informative than most.

There are few historic events whose legends are more grossly different from the reality than the New Deal administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. And there are few men whose image has been more radically different from the man himself.

Some of the most devastating things that were said about FDR were not said by his political enemies but by people who worked closely with him for years-- Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau being just one. Morgenthau saw not only the utter failure of Roosevelt's policies, but also the failure of Roosevelt himself, who didn't even know enough economics to realize how little he knew.

Far from pulling the country out of the Great Depression by following Keynesian policies, FDR created policies that prolonged the depression until it was more than twice as long as any other depression in American history. Moreover, Roosevelt's ad hoc improvisations followed nothing as coherent as Keynesian economics. To the extent that FDR followed the ideas of any economist, it was an obscure economist at the University of Wisconsin, who was disdained by other economists and who was regarded with contempt by John Maynard Keynes.

President Roosevelt's strong suit was politics, not economics. He played the political game both cleverly and ruthlessly, including using both the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service to harass and intimidate his critics and opponents.

It is not a pretty story. But we need to understand it if we want to avoid the ugly consequences of very similar policies today.

The trouble with getting rid of the parties is that for the republicans, that was what the Tea Party was all about. They hated the Democrats and were completely sick of the Republicans and wanted to change things, to bring in their own candidates that they thought would change things. But while this 'movement' is just a new face on an old idea that pops up once in a while, it once again was completely subsumed by the republican party who saw an advantage with conservative-leaning Tea Party people and bought that group out from under themselves. By the end the Tea Party is a disjointed, bickering and small group of Americans with zero agreed upon agendas. People like Karl Rove saw the opportunity and went with it. If the Tea Party thinks thy changed an ounce of anything they are completely mistaken and we'll find that out as time goes on.

The Party system certainly seems broken but if we could just get the money out of politics (and damn you surpreme court for taking a huge problem and making it that much larger) things might actually change. The two party system could absolutely use a large change but as long as there is as much money in politics as there are today, it never will.

@Gallowflak

If Glenn Beck is in an unresolved dispute with his subordinates, it's within journalism's scope to bring that up when he's being interviewed for whatever his latest issue is.

Regardless of that, though, Assange himself tied his lie about the source of the rape accusations directly to Wikileaks' activities, making it part of the issue.

If this happened to Karl Rove or Glenn Beck, most people in this thread would seek to be first in line to mock and condemn them for walking out of the interview.


The above described type of tribalism is one of the main reasons politics seems anti-intellectual to me.

>> ^blankfist:
I'll tell you about full of shit. Full of shit is a party that claims to be the party of peace, yet increases US hegemony and military spending. The Democrats should call themselves the party of wars and lies, but then they'd have to fight the Republicans for that title.
People like me, the Libertarians, are sick of paying for your two parties' wars.


Why do you think the Libertarian party is more likely to end the war than the Democratic party?

Do they have some sort of track record of honesty and commitment to principle that supersedes all other politicians?

Do they have a track record of being able to effectively enact policy at the national level?

Have they been tireless advocates against the war, and putting together PACs that spend money on anti-war ads throughout the years we've been at war?

Have their high-profile, influential voices in the media been using their megaphone to try to build a popular consensus for ending the war?

Or has everything they've ever said about the war been couched as an attack on the Democratic party, equating them to Republicans?

Just curious, because my two most frequent contacts have been you and Ron Paul, and it's all been some formation like "you Democrats would vote Libertarian if you really cared about the war, you warmongering hypocrites."

That's not commitment to ending the war, it's a commitment to use the topic of war as a wedge issue, Karl Rove style.

So this is getting some media spot light. Found an interesting comment on slashdot about the issue

"For those of you that are unaware, the concern among Muslims about depicting Muhammad is based on a few hadith that warn against doing so to prevent idolatry. The worry is that any depiction could become the focus of worship, and the depiction itself could take the place of what it represents.

Or, in other words, radical Muslims are fearful that a large faction of the faithful will splinter off and form a new denomination based on the worship of an episode of South Park. They're so anxious over this possibility, these groups have threatened to suborn the murder of Matt Stone & Trey Parker by dispatching roving death squads.

Don't click away to a calendar app—I assure you, it is 2010 and this is actually happening. (And I understand why some of you with mod points might choose "Funny" for this post, which is totally fine, but I promise everyone that this is as unbiased an accounting of the facts as I find myself able to give.)

By the way, if you happen to be a techno-savvy hard-line Muslim reading this post, I have one question for you: shouldn't your first problem, before Matt & Trey, be with the second most populous denomination of Islam, the Shi'a, who apparently have no problem with depictions of Muhammad? Is it off-base for me to ask that you sort this out amongst yourselves before requiring the non-believers to follow your religious edicts under threat of death?"

+5 insightful

>> ^alizarin:

Alternate lineup:
Rush Limbaugh
Karl Rove
Glenn Beck
Re-watch it and think about it


I don't know what's worse... Imagining this trio or realizing that if there *were* a video of it, I would be watching it with my jaw hanging open for the entire video. Possibly more than once.

.. you sunk my battleship!
>> ^alizarin:

Alternate lineup:
Rush Limbaugh
Karl Rove
Glenn Beck
Re-watch it and think about it

>> ^alizarin:

Alternate lineup:
Rush Limbaugh
Karl Rove
Glenn Beck
Re-watch it and think about it


/ragequit internet

Alternate lineup:

* Rush Limbaugh
* Karl Rove
* Glenn Beck

Re-watch it and think about it

There is some worry that anti-government republican states (yes, I know that's an oxymoron) will lose seats due to a conservative grassroots movement urging people to burn their census forms.

Come on Rove! Do you want smaller government or not?

Here's something Lee Atwater, the architect of the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush campaigns and mentor to Karl Rove, said in 1981:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can't say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

The idea is to package conservative ideas in such a way to attract racists, and provide them with a cover story so they have plausible deniability. In other words, so people like Southern Avenger here can claim "all they're doing is taking a principled stand based on their well-reasoned philosophy", even if they seem to be tolerating outrageously racist commentary and signage within their midst, and espousing a policy set that is generally condoned by racists due to its negative impact on non-whites.

These days it's less about racism per se, and more of a generalized form of xenophobia. It's the fear of people you don't know, don't understand, and who you don't want to have to care about or feel responsible for. It's why attempts to formally establish a legal responsibility to others (strangers!) are seen as intolerably intrusive.

Personally I think a lot of the rhetoric today is about dehumanizing the poor. It's often an expression of the belief that people who're poor have individually made some sort of choice that directly warrants things like losing their house, not having money for food, being unable to pay for medical care, etc. People who want on the government dime are all lazy leeches who're dragging all of society down, and if we give them help, they'll just stop trying to be productive, and try to leech more.

That started with racism, but I think just like the rhetoric, the emotional core got a lot more abstract -- it's not about demonizing black and brown people anymore, it's more about demonizing anyone who's different, so that the idea of having to take responsibility for them seems tyrannical.

I know that there's a huge percentage of moderately conservative people who don't buy into that emotional core, and want conservative-ish things done for pragmatic reasons. There's also a group of people who are True Believers, and think that the conservative ideology is morally superior to the alternatives, or that a libertarian policy set would benefit everyone greatly, even (especially?) the poor.

Those guys I like, and truly hope they find a way to purge the racists from their political organizations (i.e. the Tea Parties and the Republican party). That is, assuming they cool off on the calls for political violence (but that's a whole other conversation).

Building on what dft said, charges of racism wouldn't really stick if you guys stopped responded to it by saying "we condemn what you're talking about, and we'll take steps to ensure it doesn't happen again because racism won't be tolerated in our movement", instead of always saying "there's no racism here, and you're a racist for calling me a racist, racist!"

A more apt question might be, "Why do so many Democrats discuss polls from Media Matters as if they had credibility?"

To be frank about this - why lie when the truth is better? Back in the 00s, Democrats created a whole bunch of talking points about Bush, Rove & their agenda items. Horror stories of the military industrial complex, deficits, debt, neocons, and such were easy to sell to the left because there was some truth to it. Bush did hike military spending, increase the deficit, run up debt, and philosophically tilted towards pro-Israel foreign policy. There was meat on the Democrat propoganda bones. Like all demagogues, there was ridiculousness mixed in - but the core wasn't all that off the mark.

"Lies about Obama..." So far they aren't so much lies as they are very slight exaggerations. The GOP says Obama is socialist, is running up unsupportable debt, is taking over key industries, wants single-payer health care, energy taxes, illegal amnesty, and so on. So far I'm not seeing anything that disproves those as 'lies' any more than Democrats were 'lying' about Bush.

As far as I can tell, what the GOP is saying about Obama's agenda is just about spot on. The icky health care bill is indeed designed to wipe out private insurance and redistribute wealth while not saving money at all. Obama is warming up to hit the entire US with pointless energy taxes next. He's already leaking talking points for illegal amnesty. He's already 'bailed out' big labor pension plans using the TARP money, and is looking like he's out to use more funds to bail out other labor goons including the Teacher's union & state pensions. The CBO just released a projection that by 2020, 90% of the entire nation's GDP will be needed to meet government obligations. Please explain how the GOP is wrong in their analysis of Barak Obama as a radical leftist, socialist, big government tax & $pender who is well on the way to ruining the economy.

I'm just waiting to hear the breaking news that Boehner and Karl Rove are lovers.

Very appropriate use off the Gay tag. I cannot imagine a bigger flaming pile of queen than Karl Rove.

I love the guy defending Rove/Bush. "No wait. I never took your $1000 bet." Because he knew it was a lie.