Maggie's Farm

For those who are inclined towards a federalist, libertarian view of the American nation, the debate about the Most Destructive President probably ought to be about Lincoln and FDR.

Lincoln - a superb and fascinating human being by any measure - squashed any pretense of voluntary confederation among the units of the young nation. FDR elevated the power of the Federal government over the individual to levels which never could have been imagined previously.

However, the ultimate result of the sickening Civil War has been positive - freedom for many and preservation of the union (although one may and should question whether maintaining the union was worth the destruction of the South and 620,000 dead - the most in any war in America's history). FDR's accumulation of power in DC has been an enduring disaster which, because of the numbers of clients and beneficiaries, may be impossible to undo short of rebellion (see Vermont's recent threats to secede, but for different reasons). Did the New Deal have any impact on the Depression? No, none - and some argue that New Deal policies helped to perpetuate the Depression.

But "he cared." I am sure that he did.

Individual freedom from government power is always stolen with the excuse of "crisis." (Thus the Left has learned to have a "crisis du jour" to try to justify the expansion of the Federal government at the expense of the states and the citizen.) The Great Depression was the seemingly permanent crisis which was used to justify almost any power grab by Washington.

How was this done? The notion of a permanent severe scarcity crisis was presented, which supposedly only Roosevelt's leftist (more acurately, Stalinist) government experts were smart enough to deal with.

A piece on the subject by Captain Ed pointed me to George Will's review of Shlaes' The Forgotten Man, which we have discussed here earlier. A quote from Will:

Before Roosevelt, the federal government was unimpressive relative to the private sector. Under Calvin Coolidge, the last pre-Depression president, its revenue averaged 4 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 18.6 percent today. In 1910, Congress legislated height limits for Washington buildings, limits that prevented skyscrapers, symbols of mighty business, from overshadowing the Capitol, the symbol of government.

In 1936, for the first time in peacetime history, federal spending exceeded that of the states and localities combined. Roosevelt said that modern "civilization" has tended "to make life insecure." Hence Social Security, which had the added purpose of encouraging workers to retire, thereby opening jobs to younger people. Notice the assumptions of permanent scarcity, and that the government has a duty to distribute scarce things, such as work.

The New Deal "brain trust" was wrong about theory, wrong about the American vision of freedom, and wrong about the direction of the future. You can read a couple of our previous pieces on this subject here and here.

Addendum: The Jacksonian makes a different argument - for Pres. Wilson, here. He makes the case that the political changes from 1909-1919 set the stage for FDR. A good read.