8 ms·
Your comment omits one thing without which the reader cannot understand modern federal politics. At the same time automation was eliminating jobs at the highest
by Daniel_Newby 13y ago
Your comment omits one thing without which the reader cannot understand modern federal politics. At the same time automation was eliminating jobs at the highest rate in history, the federal government ran the money supply into the ground. This was the Great Depression.
When FDR became president, he took economic desperation as a blank check to do anything to fix the Great Depression. The federal government explicitly had no power over local manufacturing and employment, so they created the power by reinterpreting anything that hypothetically might affect later interstate commerce as if it were interstate commerce. So birthing too many piglets was the same thing as selling too much smoked pork across a state line, and the federal cops would come to your farm and correct it by killing the unlawful piglets.
This should probably have resulted in the rape of Washington, D.C., but at the time Americans were starving in Bangladesh-style tent cities and were willing to put up with a lot. Also local governments were flying the Communist flag and high federal officials were openly espousing Stalinism, so an unconventional jobs program that worked raised few eyebrows.
- csense 13y agoActually I covered all that. "All of these events gave the federal government reasons to expand its powers," where "all of these events" includes "the crises of the Great Depression and the world wars." I was going to gently explain to you something along the lines of "tone down the rhetoric if you want the people here to take your political views seriously," but then I saw you have more karma than me, so I guess you know what you're doing.
- Daniel_Newby 13y agoWhat you wrote was the public school history book version. X gave Y reasons to do Z. The details of what happened are important. The Great Depression was not aww shucks bad luck, it was a self-inflicted wound. Many of the fixes tried were also self-inflicted wounds. The rhetoric is toned down. The present political situation is unstable, and unstable situations are ripe for demagogues to take power. I fear that the expanded interstate commerce clause is our Treaty of Versailles. If we do not build a country to be proud of, someone will slap a few runes and occult symbols on the Flag and say "Here is something to be proud of." And the crematoria will run night and day.
- RichardHead 13y agoHere's an elaborate and well-defined explanation of the new deal and the changes it wrought on the American political system: http://mises.org/daily/2726 http://mises.org/daily/2726