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In the course of selling his New Deal to the impoverished American public, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt pitched his reforms by stating: "It is common sen

• pasquinelli 11y ago
  fdr had the real threat of revolution to help move things along. we aren't there yet.
• davesque 11y ago
  Ironically, it could be this very abundance of ideas which is so paralyzing. The more choices you have, the harder it is to choose. That being said, I agree that this problem has its roots in corrupt politics.
  • rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    That's why reform has to start at a local level. Solutions that work brilliantly in Massachusetts have no guarantee of succeeding in Mississippi. Whatever ends up working broadly should be adopted by the federal government. Perhaps they could provide a block grant to each of the states to experiment with reforms and study the effects.
    • ashark 11y ago
      Lots of things probably won't work very well at the state level, but might nationally. Consider what could happen if just a single state offered universal basic income, for instance.
      • rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
        That's a good point. I find it hard to imagine the system not straining after a while within a single state. Perhaps as a reach I could offer Massachusetts and its model health care system as an example. It's a high tax state with a great health care system right next to an extremely low tax state (New Hampshire). Many people who live in MA travel to NH to shop without sales tax, but very few who work in MA live in NH. So if MA instituted basic income, it might have the effect of bringing people to the state to live off the dole, but things are expensive there and some might find it easier to either work to have a higher standard of living than one with the basic dignities of food and shelter, or some people will commute from neighboring states. UBI has been experimented with in many locations, from Canada to Namibia, and they often showed the same effect: some people dropped out of the labor force, others did so but to be homemakers, volunteers, and so on, and for many of the rest, their incomes improved because they had a reliable safety net and worked to increase their earnings so they could live better, as we all do. We can consider till the cows come home, but people have put up with debate for too long. They need action.
      • jerf 11y ago
        "Consider what could happen if just a single state offered universal basic income, for instance." Roughly the same thing as one country that offers universal basic income but doesn't control its borders, for the exact same reason? Also, UBI isn't magic. If it would not work in a state individually, it does not become practical by banding 50 states it doesn't work in together. In fact, with the size of most US states, that's just generally true; it is not possible for something to not work in a state due to resource contraints but suddenly become possible when 50 insufficiently-resourced states band together.
        • rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  • digi_owl 11y ago
    I think it is more that this time round, economics as a "school" is quite a bit more entrenched. Keep in mind that during the great depression you had fascists in Italy and Germany, and communists in Russia. Now the fascists have gone underground, and the communists have imploded. All this gives the current mainstream economic thinking an air of correctness that it didn't have back then, by "virtue" of being the last system standing. Sadly what is happening now is the rearranging of deckchairs on a sinking ship. The big names of economics are arguing about where, if at all, the "frictions" are to be found in their models. This while basically ignoring that the world right now is in the biggest private debt hole since the great depression, because they think that debt and savings are one and the same (and therefore sum to zero).
    • davesque 11y ago
      Maybe the answer is somewhere in between all these failed, xenophobic systems. It always frustrates me when I see good ideas shot down in the public discourse because they sound too much like Communism or Socialism. There is a middle ground that we can't ever get to as long as politics are so polarized.
      • digi_owl 11y ago
        Nordic social democracy? Sadly its being rapidly dismantled, much like Thatcher did to the UK.
  • jerf 11y ago
    I think it's more in the increasing centralization of power. The central power is bigger and thus harder to move by sheer inertia, more risk-averse, and also more able to simply implement whatever it likes regardless of what anybody else thinks because it is isolate from the trenches. I think one of the top-3 issues facing the US right now is we need a lot more power devolved back to the states... not out of a "state's rights" sense of the argument, but out of a sheer engineering argument that trying to run a large and diverse country from one city is not working in practice, and there's no theoretical reason why it should work. Diversity and central control are, if perhaps not necessarily "incompatible" in the strictest sense of the term, still at great odds with each other; the central authority is forever tempted to homogenize diversity to make central control easier.
    • nitrogen 11y ago
      I doubt that shifting power to the states will solve many problems; after all it's the states that want to force Christianity on students, ban the teaching of science, deny healthcare to those most in need of it, lower standards for students so many HS grads are still illiterate, defund universities, and hand monopolies to oil, mineral, and telecom companies.
      • aswanson 11y ago
        On top of that, the states horrifically manage what should be simple agencies such as the dmv.
        • jerf 11y ago
          As with my other reply... do you somehow imagine that all Federal agencies are wonderfully and wisely managed? By what mental gymnastics are you maintaining that belief? Have you ever been critical of Homeland Security? Ever thought our government was too responsive to concerns about terrorists? Ever thought they were responding to climate change incorrectly? Think Obamacare is not everything it should be? Nobody really believes in the existence of this Federal government that you and nitrogen are hypothesizing for solely rhetorical reasons. It's just an argument picked up briefly to advocate for more government, then discarded in the next moment, because you're not willing to live by the rest of its implications (namely, that where you and the Federal government disagree, the Federal government must be correct; if you are not willing to say that clearly, this argument falls apart). It is not rational to compare real state governments to hypothetical federal governments.
• theseatoms 11y ago
  Shouldn't the federal government's legislative reforms move at a snail's pace? I agree that the ideas you've mentioned are worth exploring, but what makes you think that they'll try the good ideas? Also, why not start at the state or local level?
  • rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    State and local levels are the only places where there can be any real experimental reform. Just look at Colorado and the other states that have legalized marijuana by referendum. Direct democracy isn't necessarily better than elected representation, but politicians are motivated by the necessity of power, and so whoever controls the politicians controls the political process. People shouldn't be left up to decide everything, but they should have the power to question the decisions of their representatives and put an issue which garners enough support to a popular vote.
    • gshubert17 11y ago
      And businesses in the now legal marijuana business in Colorado are having problems getting into the federalized banking system because marijuana is illegal federally and banking powers have been centralized.
      • rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
        Growing pains. Problems aside it does show that there is a sizable market and the health effects have not panned out to rot the state from the inside out, as drug scaremongers have sworn would happen for decades and decades.
• oldmanjay 11y ago
  How many times has the federal government tried something that didn't work and frankly admitted the failure?
  • rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    Times when the shame was not due to failure, but success, of their actions. Like the Japanese internment camps in WWII.
  • nerfhammer 11y ago
    Hoover started out doing austerity and raising taxes to balance budgets for the first couple of years, then turned around after that didn't work and started programs very similar to the new deal in his last year in office.
• fiatmoney 11y ago
  Ironically, FDR's economic policy amounted to "we'll try every kind of beating until morale improves". Completely incoherent market interventions aren't good for markets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession_of_1937–38 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession_of_1937–38
  • stretchwithme 11y ago
    People that want to buy and sell will do that, unless someone is interferring with price or threatening profits. The Federal Reserve expanded credit to give us the Roaring 20s stock market. Eventually, there HAD to be a correction. Instead of letting things correct, government interferred and made it worse. And then kept repeating that. And we've done the same thing with the housing bubble.
• xlm1717 11y ago
  In my opinion, the most frustrating part is that despite our hyperconnectedness, people still believe the propaganda that we're not in a depression or that our leaders got us out of the recession. Future economists will call the decade the "longest depression" not out of 20/20 hindsight, but simply because there will no longer be a need to make things seem rosy.
  • jsn117 11y ago
    The terms "depression" and "recession" aren't just catch alls, they have actual definitions. And "we" (depending on the country, i'm assuming USA) are not in either.
    • paulpauper 11y ago
      depression/recession has now been redefined to mean 'economy is not how we want it to be'
      • AnimalMuppet 11y ago
        No. They haven't been redefined. They are used that way by people who are ignorant of the definitions, careless, or trying to mislead.
    • venomsnake 11y ago
      Depends. If you look at the bottom 90% and their economy - we are in depression. Or extremely deep recession. The top 10% are both capturing the lion's share of new growth and siphoning wealth from the rest.
      • dcd0101 11y ago
        No. It doesn't depend. As he said, those words have actual definitions.
        • venomsnake 11y ago
• rm999 11y ago
  It's not common sense to freely experiment with policy unless you're trying to sell a controversial progressive agenda (like, FDR in 1933). And I say this as a progressive who supports much of what he did. Applying sweeping changes is difficult and costly, and undoing them is even harder. For example, farm subsidies, which are generally unpopular, were put into place by FDR and just can't seem to go away. Fundamental changes to our economic policy would probably last dozens or 100s of years, and could not easily be rolled back even if they hurt the economy.
  • Retric 11y ago
    FDR was dealing with a far worse situation than we are used to. People where starving and huge tent city's where showing up, that's a recipe for revolution. Don't forget the communist party was gaining significant momentum. So, waiting was no longer a realistic option.
  • Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
    >farm subsidies The phrase 'Farm subsidies' doesn't quite do justice to what was put into place. The phrase sounds like just giving farmers money to grow stuff, which people might think is inefficient but probably not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. After all, these sorts of subsidies should increase supply and lower prices. The reality is there's a tangled web of price controls, subsidies, import quotas, government purchases, etc. that in many cases have resulted in higher food prices, not lower food prices as simple subsidies might imply. Take sugar, for instance. We have import quotas and tariffs on sugar resulting in higher sugar prices in the US than in the rest of the world despite having sugar growing regions in Mexico or the Caribbean on our doorstep. This is one of the reasons that we use high fructose corn syrup in everything instead of sugar. If we didn't have these laws, we'd have cheaper, more abundant sugar and probably less HFCS infused food.
    • ch4s3 11y ago
      Yeah, but we can grow corn and can't grow sugar. It a classic protectionist policy. Since HFCS and sugar are basically perfect substitutes, and the price of HFCS is so low it hardly seems to matter to consumers. Its also a stupid policy.
• clarkmoody 11y ago
  FDR tried lots of thing that had the opposite of the intended effect. Invoking the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, Roosevelt declared that "all banking transactions shall be suspended." Banks were permitted to reopen only after case-by-case inspection and approval by the government, a procedure that dragged on for months. This action heightened the public's sense of crisis and allowed him to ignore traditional restraints on the power of the central government. In their understanding of the Depression, Roosevelt and his economic advisers had cause and effect reversed. They did not recognize that prices had fallen because of the Depression. They believed that the Depression prevailed because prices had fallen. The obvious remedy, then, was to raise prices, which they decided to do by creating artificial shortages. Hence arose a collection of crackpot policies designed to cure the Depression by cutting back on production. The scheme was so patently self-defeating that it's hard to believe anyone seriously believed it would work. -- snip -- Yet after all this, the grand promise of an end to the suffering was never fulfilled. As the state sector drained the private sector, controlling it in alarming detail, the economy continued to wallow in depression. The combined impact of Herbert Hoover's and Roosevelt's interventions meant that the market was never allowed to correct itself. Far from having gotten us out of the Depression, FDR prolonged and deepened it, and brought unnecessary suffering to millions. What will be the ultimate result of the interventions you propose? How are we examining the long-term effects of government intervention in the economy and cutting back the government where it is harmful to prosperity? What about the acute depression of 1920[2]? Are we learning any lessons from that? [1] https://mises.org/library/how-fdr-made-depression-worse https://mises.org/library/how-fdr-made-depression-worse [2] https://mises.org/library/forgotten-depression-1920 https://mises.org/library/forgotten-depression-1920
  • rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    This is the most detailed rebuke I have seen yet. Thank you for adding this to the conversation. My weasley counterpoint is to say that FDR ultimately made more right moves than wrong, and he did not become, as he feared, "the last president". Economic manipulation aside, his public works initiatives like the Tennessee valley authority gave people good work when there was none, and strengthened our national infrastructure for the economy to use as it grew. The common conclusion is that the only real cure for the Great Depression was World War II, but from a Mars-eye view, wasn't that essentially an enormous public works program?
• anonbanker 11y ago
  the country's been in perpetual bankruptcy since 1787. What did you expect to happen?
• AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  The problem is that the situation is bad, but not so bad that it can't be made much worse. It's not enough to "try something" - you have to try something that at least will not hurt. If you don't know which way your thing will go, at an absolute minimum be willing and ready to bail on it very quickly if it works out badly.