Orange County Register

 4 Comments

• rlh says:

  January 2, 2009 at 11:57 am

  One of the great hobbyhorses of the right is the notion that it wasn’t the collapse of overinflated, overleveraged and outright fraudulent business practices that caused the Great Depression, but nasty governmental intervention - things like the Securities Acts, the TVA, the Rural Electrification Administration, The Wagner Act, and of course the ultimate sin, Social Security. The nonsensical nature of this argument has been well put elsewhere, so I’ll just pause for a single question.

  What, then, ended the Great Depression?

  If the New Deal worsened or prolonged the Depression, what finally cured it? Did government wise up to its evil excesses? Did the blessed free market unyoke itself from government tyranny to reassert its place in society? Were the New Deal programs repealed, revoked, smashed by a political reassertion of untrammelled (and predatory) capitalism?

  Well, no. What ended the Depression was World War II - an infusion of governmental spending - on good, services, infrastructure, research and development, employment - on a scale that made the entire New Deal look like a casual weekend outing. The Depression ended because government hadn’t previously done enough; it was not extended because government had done too much.

  This sort of wing-nut revisionism has been around for a long time. I recall reading a piece in (of all places, but this was a long time ago, so pardon me) Reader’s Digest, when I was in junior high, arguing that Hoover had the whole thing solved in the summer of 1931, only to have the looming evil shadow of FDR destroy all his hard won gains and plunge us bak into ther depths. I asked my grandparents about this idea (my grandfather had run a textile mill through the 20s until after the war), and in response got the first truly derisive laughter I ever heard from those kind old souls (my developing tastes in music and hairstyles would soon give me occasion to hear it again, alas).

  The reason for such remarkable blind vituperation is the rght’s visceral hatred for Franklin Roosevelt, a hatred that spans the generations like a running sore. And the reason for their hatred is, of course, that FDR broke the rules. He was a member of the gentry who betrayed his class, who actually did things that helped ordinary people, who halted the insane (and very exclusive) gravy train that early twentieth century capitalism had become and demanded that it work not just for its own selfish benefit, but to confer those benefits on a wider sphere. Who noted that corporate profit without social equity and stability is not merely short sighted, but ultimately destructive of that profit, and of liberty itself.

  And the worst thing about his betrayal is, it worked. Government
  intervention - massive public “interference” in the private markets and expenditures of public monies - finally broke the back of en economic collapse so terrible that it swallowed most of a decade. And he did it without sacrificing the essential private nature of the American economy, without destroying liberty or stifling individual initiative, and by in fact expanding true liberty, which must include economic security, to masses of people previously left out in the cold.

  That success, of “socialist” policies (as Mr. Landsbaum and Mr. Sowell would label them in their intellectually sloppy way), is the ultimate refutation to the Register’s unwavering and blind devotion to an abstract philosophical libertarianism - a philosophy that has never worked in the real world, just as the equally beautiful ideal of Communism has uniformly failed. No wonder they continue to despise FDR - his very existence in the history books gives the lie to all their airy idealized beliefs about all- inclusive philosophical systems.

  Adherents of both Communism and libertarianism will sniff that, well, it’s never really been tried - that the social experiments that have been conducted in their respective names (the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America, and the past generation, on the one hand; and the Soviets and old-guard Red China, on the other) have been incomplete and bastardized forms of the ideal society their philosophies espouse. This is, of course, an easy way to protect your academic purity: deny everything, especially when it doesn’t work. But it’s also morally dishonest, and blind to the real world we all must, alas, live in.

  I don’t expect the Register, or its columnists here, to recognize their blind adherence fo an ivory tower ideal that simply doesn’t work in the real world. They, like all fanatics, are too enamored of the bright, shiny, and intellectually/ogically pure thing they have positied, to allow the messy grit of day to day reality to intrude into their fantasies. But let’s us, who live in the real world, recognize their blind beliefs for what they are.
• OC Dem says:

  January 2, 2009 at 12:27 pm

  RLH,

  As you articulate so well, it is one of the many reasons Libertarians and its ideology are nothing more than an intellectual curiousity.
• JohnnyVegas says:

  January 2, 2009 at 12:41 pm

  rhl, if you want to write a book do it on your own website.

  The gov did not “break the back” of the depression.

  It was broken by a natural cycle.

  The reason for the depression was unregulated financial speculation-the same thing we have now-and that can be attributed to Wall Street and government - both.
• rlr says:

  January 4, 2009 at 11:39 am

  Sorry Johnny - I promise hereafter to fill any posts i write with cut-and-paste screeds about various GED educated public employees, and personal invective. Oh, and I’ll keep them short, so you can digest them. Too bad you didn’t finish your own GED degree, you might do betetr at reading comprehension.