I recently finished reading New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America
That Roosevelt’s economic policies prolonged the depression, and still holds the prospect of national bankruptcy over our heads, was not news to me. Contrary to helping us through the Great Depression, we know now that FDR prolonged it dramatically. The list of bone-headed policies promoted by FDR is long, and includes a 100% income tax on all income over $25,000, paying farmers not to produce, and wage and price controls. Really, the best thing he ever did for our economy was to die.
But what was really fascinating was how FDR, a habitual liar, popularized almost all of the political behavoirs we criticize today. He quite possibly did more than all other Presidents combined to undermine our Constitutional government and its system of checks and balances. Furthermore, he showed that the easiest way to electoral success is through political patronage. By funneling massive amounts of federal dollars through his supporters, while simultaneously abusing federal institutions to harass and destroy his opponents (the use of the IRS for political purposes is another of his legacies), Roosevelt easily cruised to reelection (twice!) despite a record of near complete failure. This failure was best summed up by FDR’s Treasury Secretary of over 10 years, Henry Morgenthau Jr., who said:
We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong…somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises….I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started….And an enormous debt to boot!
The lessons of this book are frighteningly applicable to today. As Obama looks to repeat the economic failures of Roosevelt, those who care about the Constitution have every reason to fear that, by emulating FDR’s corruption, he can also repeat his electoral successes and secure a new New Deal Coalition to rain terror over our economy and freedoms for another generation. Reading this book is a good first step to knowing how to stop him.
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Updates will be sparse to nonexistant while I’m on vacation. I will be back around the New Year. Merry Christmas!
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This is ridiculous:
Convicted last year of intoxication manslaughter for the death of her boyfriend, the 21-year-old daughter of a state district judge is suing the truck driver she ran into during a drunken driving crash.
Elizabeth Shelton, the daughter of juvenile judge Pat Shelton, is accusing truck driver Lance Bennett of negligence in the Oct. 23, 2007, wreck that killed her boyfriend Matthew McNiece.
Shelton had a blood alcohol concentration more than three times the legal limit, two tests showed. She was sentenced to eight years’ probation and had to serve four months in jail.
Shelton, her family and the family of the boyfriend who was killed are suing for $20,000 for the destruction of the Lexus SUV she was driving and an undetermined amount for mental anguish, pain and suffering.
Bennett was driving the box truck that Shelton rear-ended on the Southwest Freeway near Kirby around 2 a.m.
Bennett’s attorney, John Havins, said the lawsuit, filed in October, was the last chance to make a claim before the statute of limitations ran out.
He noted that Shelton named 16 defendants, including insurance companies and banks. “They’re just throwing everything against the wall to see if anything sticks,” Havins said.
Throwing everything against the wall is a common legal tactic for money-grubbing ambulance chasers. The problem is that our system does absolutely nothing to discourage this behavior. The people who are penalized are the victims of frivolous lawsuits who must pay their legal fees regardless of the outcome. The obvious answer would be to adopt a loser-pays system, where the loser in a suit pays the legal fees of the other party. It’s bad enough that this horrible excuse for a human being only spent 4 months in jail for killing her boyfriend, but now the legal system will condone hero victimizing all over again the people her reckless behavior negatively affected? This is unacceptable.
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Given the recent exposure of Chicago’s sordid political culture, one would think that Obama, already with ample shady connections to fret over, would be weary of drawing yet one more Chicago pol to Washington. But one would be wrong:
President-elect Barack Obama will nominate Chicago schools executive Arne Duncan as his education secretary at an event in the city today, transition aides said, and is expected to tap Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) later this week to serve as secretary of the interior, all but finalizing his selections for major Cabinet posts.
…Duncan, 44, has been chief executive of the Chicago public schools since 2001, steering the nation’s third-largest school district, which has more than 400,000 students. Duncan was raised in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, not far from Obama’s home, and is a longtime friend and basketball partner of the president-elect. He graduated from Harvard University, where he was co-captain of the basketball team, and he played professional basketball in Australia from 1987 to 1991. He returned to Chicago to direct the Ariel Education Initiative, which creates educational opportunities for youths on the South Side.
…Although Obama has not detailed how he will try to fix the nation’s struggling schools, he has promised to recruit an “army of new teachers,” create better tests and give public schools more funding. The president-elect has not taken sides in a debate between reform advocates and powerful teachers unions, and choosing Duncan seems to be a consensus move likely to appeal to both.
If we only had more teachers/money/tests! In other words, Obama’s solution is more of the same. More of that “change” we can believe it. But what a sad state of affairs that Obama can’t even decide whether he’s on the side of children and parents or special interest teachers unions. My, what a tough decision.
As for Duncan, I think David Boaz said it best:
Leave a commentIn seven years running the Chicago public schools, this longtime friend of Obama was apparently not able to produce a single public school that Obama considered good enough for his own children.
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December 15th is National Bill of Rights Day. The holiday was established in 1941 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the first ten amendments to the Constitution. It is of a deep irony that the President who authorized the holiday, Franklin Roosevelt, was one of the most prolific violators of the document.
This observation ties in rather well to the larger question of this post: was the Bill of Rights a good idea? I know what you’re thinking, “Of course it was! We need the Bill of Rights to protect us from government infringement on our rights.” Certainly this is a noble goal, and all of the items within the Bill of Rights are worthy of such protections. But in a world of campaign finance reform (violates First Amendment), drug wars (Ninth and Tenth) and their enforcement (Fourth), eminent domain abuse (Fourth and Fifth), coercive “plea bargaining” tactics (Sixth), gambling laws (Ninth) and social security (Tenth), it seems quite reasonable to me to consider whether the Bill of Rights has accomplished its goal, or even done more harm than good.
There was strong debate over the Bill of Rights before the ten amendments were added. The Anti-Federalists thought that the Constitution provided for a central government that would be too big and would take power from the states. History has shown that their concerns were warranted. As a check on the federal government, they demanded a Bill of Rights be included. But the arguments of the Federalists opposing the Bill of Rights have also proven prescient.
In Federalist No. 84, Alexander Hamilton argued that a bill of rights “would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?” Given that the enumerated powers of the Constitution are now all but ignored, this argument has gained historical weight.
It was also worried that a listing of rights would imply that those rights not mentioned had no protections, or were less important. In the infamous footnote 4 of United States v. Carolene Products Co. (1938), Justice Stone (actually, it was written by his law clerk Louis Lusky) articulated a distinction between different rights, stating that some would get “more exacting judicial scrutiny,” while others, like our now eroded economic rights, would not. The Footnote Four framework would remain in effect until the Supreme Court found a right to privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut, where Justice Goldberg cited the Ninth Amendment in his concurrence. Despite this, the current framework (Footnote Four-Plus) still treats the ninth and tenth amendments largely as afterthoughts. At present judges simply pick and choose which unenumerated rights deserve a presumption of constitutional protection. This is exactly the opposite of what the Constitution intended, where government would be forced to justify its actions from the list of enumerated powers, rather than being able to do anything that wasn’t expressly prohibited.
The Federalists were able to foresee this outcome, yet went along with the Bill of Rights anyway. The popular historical account is that this was a purely political concession designed to ensure enough states ratified the Constitution. This is not entirely accurate. James Madison, a Federalist, acknowledged that, “My own opinion has always been in favor of a bill of rights, provided it be so framed as not to imply powers not meant to be included in the enumeration.” In other words, a bill of rights would be desirable if it could be constructed to avoid the negative outcomes Federalists predicted. Taking the lead in authoring the amendments, Madison attempted to accomplish just such a feat. Unfortunately, we are left to conclude he was not successful. Our economic rights remain in exile, while the Ninth and Tenth amendments are all but ignored by the federal government and the courts.
Yet it is not altogether clear to me that we’d be better off without the Bill of Rights. It’s plausible that things might otherwise be worse, that even more rights would be ignored by the government. Still, it seems equally plausible that, if not for the enumerated rights (and the contrast it creates with unenumerated rights), government might have found less legal justification to stray from its enumerated powers. In either case, it’s hard to imagine a set of amendments more clear in their protections, thus suggesting little hope that better crafted amendments would better constrain government. Though if I were to offer one modest suggestion, I’d reword the Ninth amendment to say: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. And this time we mean it!“
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I recently sent the following letter to the New York Times:
To the Editor:
Timothy Egan accurately titled his recent gutter column (”Typing Without a Clue,” Dec. 7). Although meant as a reference to Joe the Plumber, it more aptly describes Egan’s elitist screed.
Egan childishly hurls ad hominems at Joe, calling him “no good as a citizen” for owing a small amount in taxes. I challenge Egan to find anyone who can understand, and follow, our entire 70,000 page tax code. Is he prepared to hold Charlie Rangel’s far more serious transgressions to the same standard, or is his ire reserved for uppity peasants? He also makes the sophomoric argument that Joe is “no good as a plumber” because Tim the Snob isn’t satisfied with his government certification. By this standard – or any other for that matter – Egan is no good as a columnist.
Sincerely,
Brian Garst
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The temporary victory was even more fleeting than I would have guessed. George W. Bush, destroyer of free markets, is preparing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory:
Facing the potential bankruptcy of iconic American firms, President Bush on Friday abandoned his longstanding objection to using using the Wall Street bailout fund to help save G.M. and Chrysler.
…Ten hours after the Senate rejected a separate lifeline for the automakers, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said in a statement it would be “irresponsible” to let the companies crash. So she said Bush will “consider other options,” including the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program that Congress created for the Treasury Department in October.
“Under normal economic conditions we would prefer that markets determine the ultimate fate of private firms,” Perino said in a statement. “However, given the current weakened state of the U.S. economy, we will consider other options if necessary – including use of the TARP program — to prevent a collapse of troubled automakers. A precipitous collapse of this industry would have a severe impact on our economy, and it would be irresponsible to further weaken and destabilize our economy at this time.”
A couple points spring to mind. First, this is an unconstitutional expansion of executive power. The White House cannot just unilaterally decide to write law because Congress chooses not to do what it wants.
Second, the justifications for this action are so broad as to make it extremely likely that government bailouts will become the norm in major industries going forward. Now any time the economy is subjectively declared to be in a “weakened state,” it will be “irresponsible” for government to allow bankruptcies, as they would “further weaken and destabilize” the economy. In other words, every recession, no matter how severe (a weakened state could mean any slow down), will be accompanied by numerous industry nationalizations. It’s a loophole big enough to drive a truck through…no, to drive socialism through.
At this rate, Bush may yet surpass FDR as the President most responsible for bringing about socialism in America.
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Thank the UAW for their stubbornness and refusal to compromise or give up any of their ridiculous benefits.
The final sticking point was the United Auto Workers’ desire to have until 2011 to reduce pay and benefits to levels paid by Japanese automakers with U.S. plants. Republicans want it done by March 31, according to a senate democratic leadership aide.
This is one of those rare instances where union stupidity is productive.
But this is only a minor victory, the war is still being lost. Part of the reason for this is that the typical “moderate” republicans (the ones, you know, conservatives are supposed to hand the party over to) are, as is so often the case, on the wrong side of the issue. The ten republican Senators who voted for the union handout bill reads like a who’s who of squishy, “moderate” RINO’s:
Bond (R-MO)
Brownback (R-KS)
Collins (R-ME)
Dole (R-NC)
Domenici (R-NM)
Lugar (R-IN)
Snowe (R-ME)
Specter (R-PA)
Voinovich (R-OH)
Warner (R-VA)
And the House sellouts:
Barton (TX)
Buyer
Camp (MI)
Capito
Castle
Ehlers
Emerson
English (PA)
Frelinghuysen
Hoekstra
Hunter
King (NY)
Knollenberg
LaHood
LaTourette
Lewis (KY)
Manzullo
McCotter
McCrery
McHugh
Miller (MI)
Murphy, Tim
Porter
Ramstad
Regula
Rogers (MI)
Ryan (WI)
Smith (NJ)
Souder
Upton
Walsh (NY)
Young (AK)
The big surprise, for me, is Rep. Paul Ryan. He’s a strong conservative and someone I’ve considered an important piece of a successful republican future. He explained his vote in a press release:
“The American automotive industry is under considerable distress, and various proposals have been put forth to provide aid to those in need. I’ve maintained that any assistance to the domestic auto industry should be drawn from previously approved funds from a U.S. Department of Energy loan package, rather than divert resources from the financial rescue package or rely on additional taxpayer dollars. H.R. 7321 cuts through the bureaucratic red tape and expedites these previously appropriated funds. Because no additional taxpayer dollars were appropriated, I was able to support this legislation.
He also described “mounting hardships” in Wisconsin as “downright gut-wrenching.” He mentioned specifically a GM plant closer, and said that “jobs in Southern Wisconsin” are “at the forefront of his mind.” This serves to show the difficulty of our task. The pressures and incentives on politicians works against us at every turn, resulting in votes like this from even the best conservatives.
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I’m not real sure anymore. Here’s how I imagine the news covering a similar period if we had lost:
The White House, Congress, and the People’s Commissariat for the Overseeing of the Occupied Territories of America (PCOOTA) have announced a plan to appoint a ‘car czar‘ to fix the capitalist auto-industry.
Initially reluctant to support a plan that would subordinate American industry to a centralized planner, both Congress and the White House were gently reminded last night by the Commissar’s office that Russian troops remain stationed outside of Washington D.C. A press conference was held immediately the next morning to announce the unanimous support of the plan from America’s three government policy bodies.
Later that afternoon, newly appointed car czar Ivan Drago held his first press conference, where he warned the “capitalist pigs” at GM, Ford and Chrysler that he will “break [them].” President-elect Obama responded by noting the similarities between the car czar’s message of change and his own campaign promises, and added, “I look forward to working with the new czar in his efforts to reign in capitalism and spread the wealth around.”
Doesn’t seem all that different, does it?
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No one familiar with Chicago politics will be surprised:
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested at his North Side home Tuesday morning. His chief of staff John Harris was taken into federal custody as well.
The criminal complaint by the FBI agents said the two had been arrested on federal corruption charges. Each were arrested on two charges of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and solicitation of bribery.
Blagojevich and Harris will have an initial appearance in U.S. District Court Tuesday.
The arrest is the latest step in a three-year probe of “pay-to-play politics” in the governor’s administration. A statement by U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said Blagojevich and Harris “allegedly conspired to sell U.S. Senate appointment, engaged in pay-to-play schemes and threatened to withhold state assistance to Tribune Company for Wrigley Field to induce purge of newspaper editorial writers.”
Federal authorities were permitted by a judge to record the governor secretly before the November election after raising concerns that a replacement for President-elect Barack Obama would be tainted.
Fitzgerald’s office said the 76-page FBI affidavit alleges that Blagojevich was taped conspiring to sell or trade Obama’s vacated U.S. Senate seat for financial and other personal benefits for himself and his wife.
According to the affidavit, Blagojevich floated the idea of “a substantial salary for himself at a either a nonprofit foundation or an organization affiliated with labor unions;” a corporate board seat for his wife worth as much as $150,000 a year; promises of campaign funds, including cash up front; and a Cabinet post or ambassadorship for himself.
Blagojevich also tried to get critical columnists fired from the Chicago Tribune.
In addition, the charges allege that Blagojevich tried to influence the composition of The Chicago Tribune editorial board in exchange for state aid to the Tribune Company, which owns the newspaper.
Fitzgerald said Blagojevich was recorded in wiretaps as saying, “Fire all those bleeping people, get them the bleep out of there and get us some support.”
Sadly, the larger lesson from this aspect of the story will likely be ignored. Government involvement in business is dangerous and prone to corruption. When a political body supplies funds, it inevitably attaches strings. This is true whether it’s the federal government giving money to the states, or government giving money to business. It becomes particularly problematic in the latter case, as government has the force of law behind it to create a further uneven playing field. Politicians seem incapable of restraining themselves from exploiting this kind of arrangement.
But many of the same people in the media who will likely, and rightfully, condemn this attack on their freedom to criticize government without fear or coercive reprisals are, at this very moment, cheerleading the democrats’ efforts to gain controlling stakes in automotive and other industries. Does anyone really think Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barney Frank will be any better at keeping their grubby hands of private enterprise than Gov. Blagojevich?
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science, but please don't hold that against me.
