History, How Things Work

Obama and FDR: Why the Longer Road to Recovery

Notice I didn’t frame the title as a question.

It was revealed during the 2008 campaign that the FDR programs during the Great Depression prolonged it by several years. Had the Dems kept their paws off the engine, the Depression would have been over by ’35 instead of running up to Pearl Harbor in ’41.

The same is being said about the Obama plan for recovery-through-stimulus, when it first began, and now three years later, we see the same pattern of prolonging. What could have been fixed through natural market forces by 2010 will now be many years more under the Obama Plan.

In fact, that is the core of his campaign. That’s all he’s brought to the table…no new plan, no new ideas, just bide your time. Early on he said things would be much worse, and on that, he’s kept his word.

But is a slow recovery actually the end game here?

We have a duty to ask, do we mark up the loss of 23 million jobs, and the destruction of several million job slots, and the failure of  thousands upon thousands (small, private sector) businesses to intent or incompetence?

The old rule is that you never blame on conspiracy what you can blame on incompetence, but I think, on balance, the evidence today leans toward an intentional governmental process here, the purposeful sanction of continued misery, while several of those twenty plus millions who lost their jobs move over to some level of state support, many hopefully finding the weather just fine on the dependency side of the street

As Stalin is reputed as saying, “Now we have fewer, but better, workers.”

Has anyone considered, maybe this has been the Plan all along?

I’m simply echoing what better minds than mine have said on the economic aspects of the Great Depression. It’s impossible for me to determine from the literature from the period that the FDR administration intentionally prolonged the Depression in order to allow its programs to take seed, but it can’t be argued that it turned out that way.

And it can’t be argued the state apparatus benefited. In fact, it’s impossible to say how much longer it would have lasted had the Japanese not had another idea in mind for the American economy in 1941. Unemployment held steady at 16% for nearly ten years, until the draft put those boys on the federal payroll.

Post-war, even with 80% tax rates, pent up demand and a productions systems just aching to bust out, much of the FDR-created economic malaise was rolled back, up to the next great socialist experiment, The Great Society, in the 1960s.

But what did hang around, what was cemented into stone, was a bureaucratic culture that no politician in the post-war era would ever considering undoing.

Still, the economic output out-paced the bureaucracy’s need to be fed….until Obamacare. America looked to England and Canada, now in their second and third generations of nation health services, to see what lay ahead in terms of real medical care under the state. Death panels, rationing and regular denial of even ordinary care as we see it in America, long delays, an MRI every 300-400 miles, season-long delays, are all seen as routine by the victims in those countries. The Canadians and Brits haven’t rushed out to get the pitchforks (guns long since banned) but rather have accepted their fate with resignation…

…for no one knows how to undo it.

A bureaucratic generation lasts from 15-20 years, but it only takes about seven years for it become laid in stone. If a bureaucracy can’t fix the problem it was created to fix within seven years, it’s there until hell freezes over. So we all know that the first mission of an embryonic bureaucracy is to subordinate its original mission to its self-perpetuation, so from Day One, the bureaucrats are in there pulling for an employment contract that never ends. If you’ve ever watched Bermuda grass grow, you know what I mean.

Understand, it is the bureaucracy, those hundreds of thousands, even millions, of paper-pushing little piglets feeding at the federal trough, that is, and has been since 1933, the principal constituents of the elected lawmakers. Not you. Not me.

They are the ones that slice the pork, taking their customary cut, (up from 10% in 1933 to about 45% today) allowing congress men and women to send some bacon back home.

Yes, pork is a result of statism, folks, not its cure.

Of the Depression, I doubt there was anything “criminal” in either the causes, or the fixes that arose, unless you want to consider the planting of socialist seeds into fertile soil to be criminal. Besides, they’re all dead and we can’t try them post mortem. I don’t think Satan would let them out on furlough to stand trial anyway.

But the current economic crisis has the smell of criminality, and that complicates this current recovery fraud a little. Real socialists want to stretch this downturn out at least five more years, more like eight, depending on who Obama selects as his successor in 2016. To cement the bureaucracy.

But the same process suits the Cloward-Piven wing of the administration as well. They know (see Greece, Spain, the EU) what the likely outcome of these policies will be in a production-weak economy, with far less bounce than it once had. A complete derailing of the US currency and economy, and with it the world. And with that, the stepping in of a national/world wide strongman. Actually, think troika, a committee of strongmen. Fascist? Communist? Doesn’t matter, the lines have been blurred for 50 years at least. As long as the name “Adolf Hitler” represents fascism any fascist named anything else can move about more or less with impunity.

Either way, clearly, Obama disguises a hidden agenda. He is biding his time.

Since we can’t know for sure, all we can do is focus on 1) replacing Obama and 2) Democrats in Congress and 3) actually reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy…in front office management levels…by at least 20% (just for starters), since that is the part of the economy that will survive a national economic collapse.

Obama has hired 400,000 new federal workers, and extraordinary amount in the GS-14 thru exempted service status, while almost none at the GS-3 entry level status. (Anyone telling Occupy no one’s still hiring their skills sets, just upper management.)

My focus here is on the cementing of yet another bureaucratic foundation which by 2018 will be impossible to dislodge by ordinary political process. Unlike FDR, this time it will be on purpose.

Already, they are saying that Obamacare is unbreakable, even as 70% of the people are still against it. They say it can’t be undone.  Booshway!

All these need to be fired, and while I know Mitt Romney can’t advertise that he intends to do what needs to be done, it would be gratifying to know that he and Paul Ryan understand the dimensions of the fix in human terms. A lot of people need to be fired, and I can provide a quick list of the first 400,000…and I don’t mean the men and women who change the sheets at the Alachua Retirement Center in Florida,

If you want to undo this, you start at the top, and fire the front office first.

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