We have written several times about the destructive effect of the FDR presidency, most recently here, so there is no need to repeat ourselves.
However, it is good to see that Burt Prelutsky has come around. He begins:
Growing up, as I did, in the home of Russian Jewish immigrants, it figures that I’d start out thinking that, by all rights, Franklin D. Roosevelt belonged on Mount Rushmore. But, all these years later, I have concluded that most of America’s woes can be traced back to his presidency, and that the best reason for him being up there along with Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington and Teddy Roosevelt, is that his head was already made of stone.
Although FDR is often, mistakenly, credited with bringing the Great Depression to an end, as Amity Shlaes made clear in her book, The Forgotten Man, his policies, which can best be described as socialistic and anti-business, in reality prolonged America’s misery. The mere fact that he and his economic advisors thought it made perfect sense to keep raising taxes during the 1930s suggests that their primary motive wasn’t to lift the country out of its economic morass, but to take advantage of the situation to inflate the power of the federal government.
The end result of his 12 years in the White House is a hodge-podge of Washington bureaucracies and an economy that finds the federal government being far and away the single largest employer in the U.S. Couple that with his personal fondness for Joseph Stalin, his filling his administration and the State Department with like-minded people, and you have a perfect blueprint for disaster. For as Thomas Jefferson recognized, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have.”
Burt sounds like a Maggie's Farm contributor. Read the whole thing.
Photo: FDR around 1917.
