Johnson, Nixon and Carter weren't the only ones to screw up a good economy. We always knew that Johnson's "Great Society", Nixon's wage and price tampering, and Carter's era of "Stagflation" and malaise were self inflicted poxes on the economy of the respective eras. It was always much harder to judge what impact FDR's policies had.
We know for example that he inherited the stock market crash from Hoover. People were going to give him a long leash. Just do something, even if it's wrong. I've always viewed the TVA and other programs like it with mixed feelings. Sure, some good came out of it, but giving people high paying jobs during a depression really did gum up the works. It did two other things that I think of as very damaging. It created the false impression that a government program can be efficient enough by itself to maintain an economy. I suppose if that were remotely true, the Soviet Union would be kicking our butt in every market. Second, any "make work" program will never accrue to our personal well being. Digging holes, and filling them up again is certainly work. It's also criminally unproductive. Any big hiring program by the government is going to tend towards "make work".
Today, nobody today knows just how hard the times were for people in 1929. The most damaging thing we saw in every historical treatment of the era, however, were the number of people out of work. Well, that's clearly what happens when wages are artificially high...people lose their jobs.
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Well, now, that's pretty damned ungrateful of you, considering that before FDR there was a widespread socialist movement organizing workers and voters (and, yes, Hollywood filmmakers) and that the very existence of capitalism in the U.S. was at stake.
What FDR did was to triangulate and coopt these people and those organizations, reducing the social misery upon which socialism feeds, and making it possible for workers to spend as well as toil, a crucial component of the consumer economy.
In short, FDR saved Wall Street from itself. I don't have any respect for that, but I thought you might.
Whew. I thought for a moment there that you were going to tell us that FDR saved Hollywood from Communism, and Wall Street from capitalism. He was a triangulator all right. For better or worse, both survived intact.
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