This good 2008 book by Burton Folsom, Jr., a professor of economic history at Hillsdale College, is a grand debunking of FDR’s effort to tame the Great Depression. He didn’t. The buildup for World War II and the war itself did. FDR succeeded only in laying the high-tax foundation of the modern welfare state.
These debunkings—another good one is Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man—are timely because Obamaloot and his socialist cronies have been explicitly following FDR’s lead since they were elected in 2008 to tame (but so far have only worsened) the longest and deepest recession since the 1930s.
Uncle Barry’s new campaign slogan “Forward!” not only is associated with European Marxism, but matches FDR’s 1936 campaign slogan “Forward With Roosevelt.”
Like FDR and his “Brains Trust,” the Obamaloots are ignorant of how business works but deeply suspicious of it, and much prefer government. So they began (as FDR did) with massive public spending (the so-called stimulus) to no apparent benefit except to their political chums (such as the bankrupt Solyndra) and a huge new welfare program dubbed Obamacare— the socialized medicine the Democrat Party has pined for since at least LBJ.
Leftie academic historians have crowned FDR “king” of American presidents. (Funny, they all think they’re kings. Michelle Obama, the first “first lady” to take numerous, expensive, tax-paid vacations, thinks she’s a queen.) But Folsom and Shlaes have the numbers and the proof that pulls back the curtain on King Franklin’s economics disaster. It’s a revealing and timely exercise, and a good forecast of the horrors ahead if King Barry and Queen Mooch win re-election.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 