Despite Obama’s many economic interventions, the economy remains stagnated at the worst unemployment levels since the Great Depression. Oblivious to reality, liberal-progressive bureaucrats remain confident that they can employ the methodology of Lenin’s Gosplan and, this time, make it work.
An Investor’s Business Daily editorial summarizes the negative impact of Obama’s Keynesian socialism and the hubris of liberal-progressive planners.
The point is not that liberal-progressives, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s Great Depression, should have done more. It’s that economic well-being is decreased by government intervention. It’s that expecting any president (and any chairman of the Federal Reserve) to control the economy is a dangerous delusion.
President Reagan’s positive results were achieved by his stepping back from economic intervention. At the same time, Fed chairman Paul Volcker brought inflation under control by stopping the Fed’s inflationary expansion of the money supply.
Still in thrall to the secular religious dogma of socialism, Obama and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, like zombies, trudge along the path that led Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to produce the worst economic downturn in our nation’s history.
As I wrote in February, 2007, (A New Deal Frame of Mind):
With our radical left-wing Congress setting forth on a mission to preserve and enlarge the welfare-state, it’s appropriate to review the arrogant destructiveness of their New Deal predecessors who created the welfare-state.
A root of New Deal failure to restore prosperity in the 1930s was its authors’ ignorance of business and finance, overlain with simplistic arrogance. The same may be said of today’s San Francisco and East Coast liberal-socialists.
The New Dealers were a brash, cock-sure bunch who came from the academic world to Washington intending to wipe out as much of our capitalistic system as possible. They viewed the business and financial communities as a cross between Neanderthal ignorance and evil perversity. They assumed that all right-thinking people were united in the view that businessmen and bankers existed to oppress “the people.”
While 1950s apologists like liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., prettied the recollections of the New Deal by describing it as “saving business from itself,” the facts show clearly that the New Dealers were rabid anti-capitalistic socialists.
Describing the literally revolutionary frame of mind of FDR and his “brains trust,” the author of The New Dealers, published in 1934, wrote:
Roosevelt had the benefit of several other great national experiments as useful points of reference for the American New Deal. He had before him the spectacle of the Soviet Union with its recent dramatization of economic reorganization through the Five-Year Plan. He had before him the example of Fascist Italy with its regimentation of business, labor and banking in the “Corporative State.” He had before him the instances of Kemal [Ataturk in Turkey], Mussolini and Hitler in restoring national pride and self-confidence to beaten or dispirited peoples.
A key word in the foregoing, which illuminates the entirety of liberalism, is experiments. Liberal-socialism-progressivism is all about ivory-tower theory aimed at constructing sand castles in mid-air, without the benefit of a foundation in real life.
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