I guess the private sector was doing fine then too, since the poor got to hear periodic fireside chats on the latest anti-business experiment

Last night during his indoor speech accepting the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party in Charlotte, we finally got the non-Hope & Change truth from Barack Obama:

And the truth is, it will take more than a few years for us to solve challenges that have built up over decades. It will require common effort, shared responsibility, and the kind of bold, persistent experimentation that Franklin Roosevelt pursued during the only crisis worse than this one.

First former Democrat President Bill Clinton, and now, current Democrat President Barack Obama tell us it turns out it was impossible for any president’s policies to restore the economy to an acceptable level in “just” 3-4 years. Never mind Obama’s promises that the Stimulus bill would prevent unemployment from ever reaching 8%. He discovered only later that the matters were worse than he thought before his Inauguration.

Of course, every recession/financial crisis is different, but why is it that the current so-called “recovery” has more in common with the Great Depression (think double digit un- and under-employment and anemic GDP) than other recoveries? Why did Republican Presidents Harding (pictured), Reagan and even George W. Bush find it possible to end inherited recessions with sharp V-shaped recoveries worthy of the name? Harding in the 20th and most all American presidents in the 19th Century did so by essentially letting the economy heal itself. JFK, Reagan andDubya had to act because inherited policies and laws had made government the impediment to recovery.

Are Democratic Presidents ignorant of what fosters economic recoveries? I won’t insult members of my former party that way. No, they understand that if government gets out the way, relatively speaking via less taxes and regulation, that Americans will exercise their Liberty to pursue happiness via job-creating private business profits; and Voila!, Recovery happens! But are happy and prosperous citizens living free lives their first priority? It doesn’t seem so, judging by their actions.

Beginning with President Woodrow Wilson and continuing through his party successors FDR, LBJ, Carter, Clinton and Obama; Democrats prefer “reform before recovery” if they can get away with it and be re-elected. Hence President Obama’s obsession with a government takeover of the health care and insurance industries while 1/5 of American men left the work force.

FDR, to a certain extent, “got away with it”, if by that term we mean, got re-elected despite ongoing economic failure, mainly because the unemployment rate did drop from 25% to 17% right before the Election of 1936. Thanks to more of FDR’s mostly anti-business “experimentations”, the unemployment never dropped below 14% before 1941, and a double-dip of the Depression occurred in 1937-9. Even many of his Keynesian/Brain Trust gurus, including John Maynard himself, bemoaned his “reform before recovery” agenda, as recounted in Jim Powell’s, FDR’s Folly.

Does Obama think he can get away with failure despite the rise in the number of under-employed, unemployed and disabled? Somehow, the rich aristocrat managed to connect with average Americans, despite the evil of being born into money. Has the Hawaiian-born, Indonesian-raised middle-class, ACORN lawyer/Community Organizer shown a capacity to so connect? Did his stimulus build any public works ala FDR’s alphabet soup, other than green and white signs announcing local Recovery Act spending? Is killing Osama bin Laden after months of knowing where he was the equivalence of McArthur’s War in the Pacific or Ike’s Battle of the Bulge? We don’t think so.

The liberals in academia, Hollywood and the Press got very mad when their eggheads were discredited by Whittaker Chambers and Richard Nixon. They made sure that the suffering that went on from 1929-1941 was depicted thru a lens of Hoover, bad; FDR, good. Yes, we saw the Grapes of Wrath, but wasn’t the scene of the WPA or CCC bathrooms supposed to hint that a caring government was all that was necessary? That and nuclear families huddled around radios and the fireplace listening to an Upstate New Yorker chat?

Mr. Obama, speeches don’t feed a hungry child now and they didn’t from 1929-1941. Get out of the way, please and let We the People bail ourselves out.

Finally, even FDR saw the economic light after he saw the German military machine blitzkrieg across Europe and over England. Against the wishes of his New Dealers, as recounted in Arthur Herman’s, Freedom’s Forge. So, Mr. President, you would have been better advised to call Paul Ryan two years ago and taken his advice rather than drag in the Big Creep that tried pass to Obamacare back when Hillary could still get by with wearing her hair long.

Mike DeVine