Came across a rather vicious piece of tripe a couple of weeks ago, an article written by the illustrious Amity Shlaes, more of her tireless campaign to discredit FDR and the New Deal. History has always been one of my passions, specifically Depression through Kennedy US history as these were the periods my grandparents lived through and I had heard stories of these times from a very early age. Talking runs in my family (surprise surprise) so I had, what I consider, one of the best first hand education in an important period in American History.

Amity's beef with FDR and The New Deal fascinated me because I had never heard or read anyone making her claims that he actually made the Depression worse. My grandparents, both lifelong Republicans, adored Roosevelt. I once asked them why they were such fans when they never voted Democrat. Their answer was "because he was for the people". Say what you will about Roosevelt and his policies, he was a man loved by the people of the nation he ruled.

To focused so narrowly on such a minuscule portion of what this man represented to this nation in BOTH The Depression and World War II, is, in my opinion, a glimpse into the soul of people like Amity and the psychopaths she is an apologist for. They see everything in terms of money. They hate Roosevelt because people like them lost money when he was president, he took the money they had raped from the nation and the world and gave a great deal of it back to the people who had broken their backs for generations for that money. They hate Roosevelt because he took that money and gave it to starving old women.

So without further adieu, I present a very good take-down of the whole "The New Deal made The Depression Worse" meme. It's long, but I highly recommend it as it is very useful for easily punching holes in the arguments or our less enlightened "Libertarian Leaning" brothers and sisters.


FDR's Latest Critics
Was the New Deal un-American?

So on the numbers, the U.S. economy improved briskly during the New Deal. Things that are moving quickly and in the right direction, but still haven't reached their destination after a while, are things that have a long way to go—which is true of the U.S. economy recovering from 1932. Historians disagree on which part of the New Deal most encouraged economic growth, but at the least the New Deal did not prevent this recovery.

Shlaes makes a different argument about numbers, because she uses different numbers. She starts each chapter with a rat-a-tat of just-the-facts, but instead of GDP, which represents the overall economy, she quotes the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which represents the maybe 10 percent of Americans who owned stock. And though she quotes an unemployment number, she doesn't quote the figures I've just mentioned. Instead she chooses different estimates of unemployment that (she acknowledges) show a much larger share of Americans out of work during the New Deal.

If you want to know how the New Deal treated ordinary Americans, this choice really matters. Let's look at a figure Shlaes gives twice in her book and again in her Wall Street Journal editorial: She has unemployment at 20 percent in the 1937-38 recession. That's appalling—almost as bad as 23 percent in 1932. Based on such a statistic, you could think the New Deal wasn't alleviating the Great Depression. But that number hides something: A third of the people Shlaes counts as unemployed had a job that the New Deal gave them through its relief programs.