Michael Barone: Obama’s New Deal Blues
[Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner.]
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....
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 transportation policy protected existing trucking firms from competition — a policy overturned by the likes of Ralph Nader and Edward Kennedy in the 1970s....
Read entire article at National Review
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....
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 transportation policy protected existing trucking firms from competition — a policy overturned by the likes of Ralph Nader and Edward Kennedy in the 1970s....