Hale Stewart begins a series of posts looking at just how bad the Depression really was, and just what difference government intervention made. Instead of talking points, he is using data and facts. He begins his analysis with Milton Friedman's own description of just how bad the Depression really was.
Paul Krugman points to the underlying racial component in the last 30 years of Republican anti-government ideology, beginning with the words of Lee Atwater, always a candid source whether boasting after the latest victory or remorsefully confessing and repenting all on his deathbed.
My father hated FDR with a black passion (even though he was a kid during the New Deal and WWII). The New Deal was the Original Sin from which so much subsequent upheaval and decadence began. Roosevelt destroyed the greatness of Gilded Age America.
I used to remind my father of how much he hated FDR every time he deposited his Social Security check into his federally insured bank account.
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I was only 2 years old when my American grandmother died, but her daughter (my mother) used to tell a story related to FDR. My grandmother was a Republican true and true. During the depression, she'd see the newsreels at the movies and when FDR would show up on them, my grandmother would say loudly in the theatre, "The voice of the hypocrite is heard across the land."
Funnily enough I just lunched with a friend who described how his father bought a round of drinks for everyone in the club when he heard of FDR's death. "That man in the White House".
He saved the US and helped save Western Civilisation.
My aunt, to her dying day, could be thrown into a rage by the phrase "FDR was one of the greatest Presidents we've ever had." But she had no problem cashing her SS checks.
It's funny...
Only today I saw an article in the conservative Le Figaro praising the economist John Maynard Keynes, later Lord Keynes, l'Homme de l'Année; The Man of the Year... hailed by right and left... in the year of crisis...
http://www.lefigaro.fr/economie/2009/01/03/04001-20090103ARTFIG00156-john-maynard-keynes-l-homme-de-l-annee-.php
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