THE NEW DEAL: EPIC FAIL

THE NEW DEAL WAS AWFUL.

The assumption is that the New Deal vanquished the Depression. Intelligent, informed people differ about why the Depression lasted so long. But people whose recipe for recovery today is another New Deal should remember that America's biggest industrial collapse occurred in 1937, eight years after the 1929 stock market crash and nearly five years into the New Deal. In 1939, after a decade of frantic federal spending -- President Herbert Hoover increased it more than 50 percent between 1929 and the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt -- unemployment was 17.2 percent.

"I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started," lamented Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Treasury secretary. Unemployment declined when America began selling materials to nations engaged in a war America would soon join.

In "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression," Amity Shlaes of the Council on Foreign Relations and Bloomberg News argues that government policies, beyond the Federal Reserve's tight money, deepened and prolonged the Depression. The policies included encouraging strong unions and higher wages than lagging productivity justified, on the theory that workers' spending would be stimulative. Instead, corporate profits -- prerequisites for job-creating investments -- were excessively drained into labor expenses that left many workers priced out of the market.

In a 2004 paper, Harold L. Cole of the University of California at Los Angeles and Lee E. Ohanian of UCLA and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis argued that the Depression would have ended in 1936, rather than in 1943, were it not for policies that magnified the power of labor and encouraged the cartelization of industries.

YET OBAMA WANTS TO USE THE NEW DEAL AS HIS MODEL.

GO FIGURE.

• WELL... IT DOES FIGURE:
  
• SOCIALISM HAS ALWAYS FAILED - EVERYWHERE, YET LEFTIES PERSIST IN ADVOCATING IT.
• JUST AS THEY PERSIST IN ADVOCATING AGW - THOUGH IT IS TOTAL BS.
• AS THEY STILL SAY WE LOST IRAQ. WRONG.
• AS THEY SAY BUSH TAX CUTS WENT MOSTLY TO THE RICH. WRONG.

THE ELECTION OF OBAMA REFLECTS NOT SO MUCH THE MAJORITY OF THE ELECTORATE'S DESIRE FOR CHANGE AS THE PREDILECTION MANY AMERICANS STILL HAVE FOR FANTASY IDEOLOGIES.

AND FANTASY IDEOLOGIES WON'T IMPROVE ANYTHING IN THE REAL WORLD.

(MORE ON FANTASY IDEOLOGIES HERE AND HERE.