Obama making same mistakes as FDR
FDR didn't know what to do about the Great Depression he inherited from Herbert Hoover, so he tried everything. He hiked taxes, spent more money, established monopolies, enforced cartels, filed antitrust lawsuits, promoted compulsory unionism, multiplied business regulations, denounced investors, and started welfare programs, public works projects, a big entitlement, on and on.
One theme runs through such
misguided policies: the failure to focus single-mindedly on the recovery of the private sector that pays all the bills, including tax bills. FDR was very much a creature of the "progressive" era, when many intellectuals embraced the view that experts could make a better world if only they had enough power.
Some of FDR's New Dealers were impressed by Mussolini's fascist corporate state model, others liked Stalin's centralized economic planning in the Soviet Union, and still others just seemed to believe that any problem could be fixed by issuing more laws and regulations.
With very few exceptions, New Deal discussions weren't about helping the private sector recover. Discussions were about making government bigger.
The influential newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann observed that New Deal reformers would "rather not have recovery if the revival of private initiative means a resumption of private control in the management of corporate business." Whatever gave "progressive" intellectuals the idea that government could run an economy? History is littered with government failures.
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