Daniel Hannan: Franklin Roosevelt? Here are ten far greater US presidents
[Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999.]
Further evidence of the unwisdom of experts. A major survey of British academics has come up with a ranking of US presidents. In top place, predictably, is that old despot Franklin D Roosevelt.
What a perfect illustration of how received opinion tends to be wrong. Roosevelt is praised for having rescued the US from recession through the New Deal. In fact, the New Deal almost certainly prolonged the slump. Its mass of regulations encouraged cartels and crony capitalism, burdened businesses and deterred employers from taking on workers. In 2004, two economists at the UCLA, Harold L Cole and Lee A Ohanian, conducted a major study which concluded that the New Deal had in fact lengthened the recession by seven years:
President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services. So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.
Yup. In Britain, by contrast, the policy of slashing the deficit worked. You don’t believe me? You have in your mind, perhaps, an image of the Jarrow marchers? There were, as in any period of economic transition, some who suffered terribly. But the raw data tell the story: the 1930s saw greater net growth than any other decade in British history.
Even if we disregard FDR’s economic legacy, it is impossible to ignore his autocratic leanings...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
Further evidence of the unwisdom of experts. A major survey of British academics has come up with a ranking of US presidents. In top place, predictably, is that old despot Franklin D Roosevelt.
What a perfect illustration of how received opinion tends to be wrong. Roosevelt is praised for having rescued the US from recession through the New Deal. In fact, the New Deal almost certainly prolonged the slump. Its mass of regulations encouraged cartels and crony capitalism, burdened businesses and deterred employers from taking on workers. In 2004, two economists at the UCLA, Harold L Cole and Lee A Ohanian, conducted a major study which concluded that the New Deal had in fact lengthened the recession by seven years:
President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by extension reducing employment and demand for goods and services. So he came up with a recovery package that would be unimaginable today, allowing businesses in every industry to collude without the threat of antitrust prosecution and workers to demand salaries about 25 percent above where they ought to have been, given market forces. The economy was poised for a beautiful recovery, but that recovery was stalled by these misguided policies.
Yup. In Britain, by contrast, the policy of slashing the deficit worked. You don’t believe me? You have in your mind, perhaps, an image of the Jarrow marchers? There were, as in any period of economic transition, some who suffered terribly. But the raw data tell the story: the 1930s saw greater net growth than any other decade in British history.
Even if we disregard FDR’s economic legacy, it is impossible to ignore his autocratic leanings...