| Senlis said: It's funny how everyone is ready to misread the post to defend FDR. I did not say FDR passed the tariff; Neither does Sowell. Hoover passed the tariff, which caused the massive unemployment. The point is that if FDR had left the economy alone when he came to office, the Great Depression would have ended a lot sooner. Instead, he expanded on Hoover's legislature with his "New Deal" and prolonged it. Economists know that during a recession (or depression), there is a certain cycle of going low and then rising back up the businesses have to do before the recession/depression ends. Government interventions slow that cycle down. In M.A.S.H., when Charles whould not talk to Hawkeye or B.J., one of the worst insult Hawkeye says to get Charles to speak is "Your family voted for Roosevelt......four times!!!!!!!" And, before anyone says it, I am not saying Roosevelt is worse than Hoover. It is that Roosevelt was so popular when in office, as opposed to what people think of him now.
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Economists thought that our economic policies for the last 20 years would result in no problems what so ever and that low taxes and low regulation were ideal for the market. Look where that got us.
I don't necessarily think its a good idea to tout economists as the end-all-be-all of economic theory when they all ended up with egg on their face within the last 6 months.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
