FDR and the Depression-Don't Let Facts Get in the Way of Toadying

How wrong can Mr. Black be? He jumps through convoluted hoops to make un-makable points in his retort.

Amity Shlaes cut deeply into the myths nurtured from the New Deal and its long term inheritors. Her corrections were decades overdue, but her honest scholarship has been treated by statist academics as heresy! [Mooserider]

FDR and the Depression: A New Round - Conrad Black on National Review Online

My agreements and disagreements with Amity Shlaes.

"Where we agree in interpreting the economic experience of the Thirties is that U.S. unemployment on Inauguration Day 1933 was between 25 and 33 percent; that it was between 12 and 16 percent in late 1934, and between 9.8 and 14.2 percent just before the 1940 election; and that unemployment was effectively eliminated in the U.S. before America’s entry into World War II in December 1941."

"Beyond this, we seem to part company, as on that record, I do not see how Amity could write, as she did last week on NRO, that “Roosevelt did fail to end the Depression.” She applies the criterion of “getting back to where we were before.” When Roosevelt died in office in April 1945, after more than 12 years as president, U.S. GDP had more than doubled from 1933, and was half the economic product of the entire war-ravaged world."

"Amity acknowledges that within a year of taking office, Roosevelt could claim that more than 60 percent of the unemployed were “gainfully employed,” albeit about 60 percent of the reduction was in the giant New Deal workfare infrastructure and conservation programs. Yet she describes this as an “Obamaesque argument.” I don’t think so, as these were real jobs, and after $1.4 trillion of deficit spending, President Obama is reduced to implausible arguments about saving jobs that would otherwise have been lost, rather than creating new ones."

The above example demonstrates Mr. Black's rationalization that FDR ended the depression before WWII by dramatically reducing unemployment though the soft conscription of the unemployed into "giant New Deal workfare infrastructure and conservation programs." This has the same effect as conscription into to the armed forces or arresting the the hoards of unemployed as vagrants. The unemployed become wards of the state, not gainfully employed workers in a free market. Thus the unemployed are then removed (sometimes with police powers) from the potential workforce. Eliminating the statistically 'unemployed' alters the statistic not the reality.

Governments have historically devised paper and real ways to eliminate inconvenient human elements.

Government taxes the actual private workforce, then funds localized projects that literally buy support in future elections. This created a perennial cycle we are stuck with today.