America — a bastion of brainlessness

by Mustang

The truth is that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal policies destroyed the lives of millions of Americans.  There is no sense, or justification for repeating that disaster.

Roosevelt’s primary victims were the very people he spoke to on the Radio during his fireside chats: the American poor.  This is not my undocumented opinion — it is the opinion of notable economists at our most prestigious universities: Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, to name a few.

Roosevelt financed his New Deal programs by tripling federal taxes, and then, for good measure, he also increased excise taxes, personal income taxes, inheritance taxes, corporate income taxes, holding company taxes, and so-called “excess profits” taxes.  Most of all, F.D.R. loved his “sin taxes” placed on alcohol, cigarettes, matches, candy, chewing gum, margarine, fruit juice, soda pop, automobiles, tires, and telephone lines — there seemed no limit to this man’s imagination.  Who paid these taxes?  Typical among the Democrat’s taxation policies, the people who could afford them least: America’s poor.

Whether F.D.R. intended to hurt these people, whom he said he loved, is not the point.  The road to hell is paved with good intentions.  In fact, though, he forcibly removed 72,000 Americans from their homes by asserting eminent domain over private land throughout the Tennessee Valley.  Farmlands and towns were seized so that Roosevelt could flood 750,000 acres of bottomland.  The farm owners received compensation, but the sharecroppers (regardless of race) only got the boot.  Try to imagine that on Monday, you owned a dry goods store that was moderately successful — and only a few days later, the federal government served you notice of eviction.  It did help (the government) to have corrupt federal judges sitting on the federal bench who owed their allegiance to the Stalinist Franklin Roosevelt.

To justify this disgusting display of government power over the people, Roosevelt and his (too many) New Deal administrations constantly referred to the rundown “shacks, cabins, and pig sties” where those Hill Billie’s lived and how F.D.R. was doing everyone a favor.  Except (which is typical of the political elite), they don’t know (or care) how devastating it was for even a poor man to lose all he ever had.  But landowners were not the only victims.  People who put food on the table through subsistence and tenant farming were tossed out, too.

This all happened at a time when 17% of the country was out of work, and F.D.R. imposed his gut-punching tax increases — making unemployment even worse through around 1942.  That year, because of World War II, unemployment dropped to 4.2%.  Returning to work didn’t help many people because Roosevelt’s spending produced a 10% recession.  Added to all the new taxes, employers also had to pay social security taxes.

In 1933, the National Industrial Recovery Act forced cuts in industrial production and forced wages above market averages, which made labor more expensive when businesses were barely able to open their doors.  Which group suffered most because of Roosevelt’s New Deal?  Overwhelmingly, Blacks suffered the most.  Yes, indeed: those Democrats are real financial management geniuses.  One wonders, given this horrible history of the depression, why any American votes for a Democrat — and it’s much worse now than it was in 1933.

Federal policies made sure to reduce the number of companies operating inside the United States, too.  Should anyone ever wonder why so many U.S. companies have moved their manufacturing sites to Mexico, China, or Indonesia, look no further than the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.  At the worst possible moment, Roosevelt put pro-communist labor unions in charge of the American Industrial sector.  Business owners responded as they should have — they began looking around for alternative labor ideas.  Who did that?  Your federal government did that.

All that “good” you might have read about the New Deal period is pure poppycock.  The Agricultural Adjustment Act destroyed black farmers.  Indeed, some jobs were “created” during the Roosevelt years, but not as many as were destroyed.  Thanks to Roosevelt, economic conditions were so horrible in the South that it sparked one of the largest black migrations in the nation’s history — which is how Detroit (and other once-desirable cities) transformed into a slum.

Note: the pictures of economically depressed American towns from the late 1950s to the present are (nearly) identical to the slums one sees in photographs of communist swamps in Moscow and other Soviet-era cities.  One should also note that Roosevelt’s southern tier policies resulted from the fact that he already had the support of southern Democrats — people who danced in the streets as thousands of black people moved to Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.

Elsewhere, where American consumers needed a break, they didn’t get one from the Roosevelt administration.  As one analyst recently noted, Roosevelt hammered consumers.  But even though this all happened (nearly) a hundred years ago, attitudes among modern Democrats and some Republicans continue to speak the idiocy of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, proclaiming, “You didn’t do that.”  Here’s the absurdity: everything that works well in this country the American people can take credit for — everything that goes wrong in this country belongs to the federal government — something to consider as we approach the next election cycle.  Government is always more problem than it is a solution.

Mustang also has blogs called  Fix Bayonets and Thoughts From Afar