Maggie's Farm

Happy New Year! Continued success and thanks for the wonderful product. Love this site.

Just finished 'The Forgotten Man', by Amity Schlaes. An objective history of the period. The striking thing was her non ideological approach to telling the story through the experiences of Mellon,Insull,Wilkie and the Schechters on the one hand as well as what may have been driving the 'brain trust' members of the administration. She leaves it to the imagination of the reader to figure it out. FDR's anti free market assumptions and the demonization of business he employed to institutionalize the new bureaucratic administrative state was a tragedy even though he was unable to completely kill the ingrained, good natured optimism of those he targeted. The atomization of American society into abstract groups of interest became the norm then and the country has continued it's slide in that direction ever since. Federalist/democrat was the old ideological divide before FDR. His assumptions seem to have won the day and the new divide is between optimism and cynicism. FDR put a smiling face on an over reaching policy with the apparent goal of making everyone an employee of the new centralized state. His use of the NRA to target small business and the income tax to cripple his more powerful opponents was frightening and, along with other retrospectively wierd policies, obviously prolonged the depression. Statism was in the air at the time and the 'new deal' simply insitutionalized it here.

Hoover and FDR were cut from the same cloth. Protectionism, confiscatory taxes, centralization and over regulation intensified a run of the mill recession that became the depression. FDR's addition of class conflict only deepened the mess and kept recovery out of reach. New Deal policies were nuts.