Mike Barone explains how the left lost its way in an economic crisis - again. Back to the Future Time. And so damned sad and pathetic. Read the whole thing. Hattip NRO.
That’s not accidental. The template for the Obama Democrats’ policies, the New Deal of the 1930s, was not designed to stimulate economic growth, but to freeze in place a tolerable but not dynamic status quo.
The New Deal’s father, Franklin Roosevelt, believed that the era of economic growth was over, just as many contemporaries believed that technological progress was at an end (how far could you go beyond the radio and the refrigerator?). FDR, like his cousin Theodore, was an affluent heir who had contempt for men who built businesses and made money. They were “economic royalists” and “malefactors of great wealth” — sentiments echoed by Barack Obama last week.
The initial New Deal program, the National Recovery Act, set up 700-plus industry codes to hold up wages and prices. That made some sense in a time of deflationary downward spiral but proved unsustainable over a longer term.
Later New Deal programs strengthened labor unions in an attempt to protect current workers and freeze work rules in place — which tended to block the flexible management practices that eventually gave a competitive edge to later foreign-based auto companies. New Deal transportationpolicy protected existing trucking firms from competition — a policy overturned by the likes of Ralph Nader and Edward Kennedy in the 1970s.
High tax rates on high earners and continued uncertainty over increased regulation and unionization led to what economists called a capital strike. Job creation was dismal as the 1930s went on, and unemployment hovered over 10 percent until wartime mobilization began in the 1940s.
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