In order to make sure that they do, I always bring something to give them.
And coming back along the two sides of the room now is what I'm giving you to make sure that you get something out of this talk.
It has a little caption at the bottom of it that is not part of the original being reproduced here.
It says, a great moment in American monetary policy, but I don't know, I think it's greater than that even.
And it's kind of one of the great low points of American history, period.
But no one should be without at least a replica of this executive order.
And so now you've got yours.
This session has to do with the New Deal and that's been mentioned already a number of
times in the conference.
I want to touch upon certain themes that relate to the New Deal because 50 minutes is far
There's far too little time to even summarize what it involved.
The New Deal is the name that historians and to some extent people at the time gave to the Roosevelt administration's domestic policies between 1933 and 1938.
There's another sense in which the New Deal went on and on and, in a sense, lives on today and incarnated in such people as Hillary Clinton.
But there have been changes over time and the classic New Deal was brought to a halt in 1938 by opponents of the Roosevelt administration.
and some of them conservative Democrats from the South and others Republicans in the Congress, mainly.
And so the achievements, as they're called, of the New Deal ended in 1938 and after that,
Roosevelt turned his thoughts to mastery of the world so having repaired all the
domestic problems he could move on. The Roosevelt administration as I mentioned
earlier today came into office at a time that was extremely propitious in the
In the sense that the economy had been contracting for four years, many people were desperate to to do something and therefore the public and the Congress were receptive to proposals made by the President, almost without regard to what they were,
So long as at least one of them was designed to benefit my interest group or me in particular.
So there was a kind of breaking of the dam that normally obstructs legislation in the
Congress and an enormous number of laws were enacted and on the strength of those administrative
Agencies created in the first hundred days of Congress's session in the spring of 1933.
There has never been anything like it, although there was something similar in the spring of 1935.
But we had this mind-boggling assortment of very important laws,
It's obviously something like the National Industrial Recovery Act, which authorizes the president to create cartels throughout American industry, that was without precedent.
There had never been anything like that before. It had great importance. This wasn't something you could just laugh off. It was going to affect you in many ways.
In addition, an Agricultural Adjustment Act was passed, which resembled that in the sense that it gave the president and his designated subordinates authority to take actions to control production, marketing and prices of agricultural commodities in a way that had never been done before.
There had been some agricultural intervention during World War I, but nothing on that scale.
And it just goes on and on.
If you look at all of the programs that came out of these enactments,
the historians have tried to organize the story of the New Deal in a number of ways.
But one of the ways that I still find somewhat useful is to take the first two years of it and set that apart from the next part from 1935.
These are known as the first New Deal and the second New Deal.
And sometimes they're described as essentially different.
I don't think they're essentially different so much as they were set in motion by different factions.
And I'll come back to that in a moment.
But there were some things that were done during the first New Deal that were abandoned or largely abandoned in the second and vice versa.
There were some innovations in the second phase.
I've just, could you hit the lights right there, the bank of four? Thank you.
I've taken from an article of mine a table, which is, you see from the title, if you can see the title from that distance,
it's called selected acts of Congress substantially attenuating or threatening private property rights.
Now, that's not ordinarily how one lines up New Deal enactments, but practically all of them can be placed under that rubric.
And the ones that don't fit, I've left off, but as you see, a number of important enactments remain, which I think can be viewed in that way.
Historians have not viewed them in that way as a rule.
Rule. Many historians have recognized, of course, that certain New Deal enactments or
programs did chip away at private property rights or did somehow interfere in the conduct
of business, but they've not generally viewed the New Deal as an attack on private enterprise
or private property. Now we'll say that they should have taken into account the great many
people at the time who viewed the New Deal in those terms. Historians have a tendency
to talk about Roosevelt and all of his glorious programs almost as if the whole nation fell
in line behind him. And while it is true that he won a great deal of support during his
his first term and was re-elected by a large margin, it is certainly not the case that
he had no opponents, he always had opponents and he had, after 1937, he had growing numbers
of opponents and they were the ones that brought this frenzy to an end.
But as you can see, I've mentioned the Industrial Act and the Agriculture Act, but their enactments
to alter banking control, securities regulation, to build an entire regional development enterprise
along socialist lines, the Tennessee Valley Authority, to repeal the gold standard, which
the handout relates to, to provide farm credit, to change the laws regulating railroad transport,
to interfere in mortgage lending and home lending, and that's just all in 1933.
Now, normally if you had a congress that enacted any one or two laws of such scope and importance
This is entirely out of scale for American politics.
The next year we have some additional laws following up.
For example, the Securities Exchange Act created the Securities and Exchange Commission, which
itself was a major threat to the conduct of capitalism.
Few things are more central to capitalists than the issuance of stocks and bonds, and although the states had imposed some regulations on that activity before, the federal government had not, hence forward the SEC would be the so-called watchdog imposing excruciatingly detailed requirements on corporations that had publicly held stock whenever they wanted to
to sell any new stock or bonds or any other debt instruments.
So this eventually reached the absurd point
that my brother who once worked for a big corporation
and his responsibility was actually overseeing
the applications they sent to the SEC
for approval to issue bonds.
He became known as the vice president in charge of commas
because if you didn't have a comma in just the right place in your SEC notice,
they might turn you down and there could be a hundred million dollars worth of
bonds you couldn't sell when you plan to. So it did achieve absurd extremes but
But that's the way government regulation tends to move.
Now the New Deal has been described by many people in a variety of ways and it is a difficult
thing to understand because the first thing is it did not have any ideological coherence.
I mean some people looked at it and they said this is just socialism but it's certainly
It's only a mistake to say these New Dealers were a passel of socialists.
Included in the crowd were all kinds of political views, all sorts of political backgrounds and persuasions and experience and ideals.
Now, it's also the case that this variety did have a certain common denominator, which is that virtually all the New Dealers were, in a sense, heirs of the progressives in one way or another.
They were all people who were looking to government action, and specifically to federal government action, to solve some perceived social or economic problem.
So that's the very definition of progressivism in one way, but you had new dealers who were adherents of the gold standard.
You had new dealers who were rampant inflationists who wanted to print paper money as fast as the presses would roll.
You had new dealers who wanted something like central planning.
You had New Dealers who said that was anathema, they wanted private enterprise, you had some
that wanted antitrust policy, you had others that wanted to cartelize everything.
So it was just a huge confusing mishmash of people, but they were all looking for the
government to do something different.
So if you understand that, you begin to understand why so often the New Deal worked at cross-purposes.
And it did work at cross-purposes, even if there were such a thing as a constructive
government policy, which aside from protecting private property rights and suppressing violent
disorder, it's hard to imagine what such a thing might be.
But if there were such a thing as a constructive government policy and they had had one, then
it certainly would have been offset by other programs they were enacting at the same time.
So it was just a terribly confusing collection of policies working against each other.
Now another element that is helpful in describing the first New Deal is that a great many of
The programs were revivals of programs that had been used in World War I.
As I said earlier, people during the Depression said, how can we cope with this national emergency?
Well, we've had national emergencies before.
We had one in 1917.
And the Brute Gang tells us they dealt with it just swell.
So let's use the same methods as we used before.
One of these agencies which actually was not a New Deal agency as such because it was created
in 1932 but was embraced by the New Dealers and expanded and used for many new purposes,
the Reconstruction Finance Corporation was so much a revival of the War Finance Corporation
that they went back to the files and got some of the forms they had used that the War Finance
Corporation just crossed out the word war, wrote in Reconstruction and used the same
forms. So that's a case in which there's no disputing that this was simply a revitalization
of a previous plan. The securities regulations harken back to the World War I, the Capital
Issues Committee, which had tried to regulate in a vague way the issuance of corporate
stocks and bonds.
The Agricultural Act was to some extent modeled after activities of the Food Administration
headed by Herbert Hoover.
The National Industrial Recovery Act was administered by something called the National Recovery
Administration, and that was modeled on the War Industries Board that Baruch had headed
during World War I. In fact, there was much talk of putting Baruch in charge of the NRA,
and he declined and sent his boy, General Hugh Johnson, to head it instead. The Agricultural
Adjustment Administration was headed by another one of Baruch's flunkies, a man named George
Peek.
And so it went down the line for many of the programs created during the first New Deal.
So in a way you can see that the war model and the Baruch gang view are very important
in the first New Deal.
The third thing that gives a little bit of coherence to many of these programs was that
people perceived a problem of low prices and they thought if we can just find a way to
raise prices we'll get out of the depression.
Well, of course, at best they had things backwards, but as I mentioned earlier, if you're a businessman,
it's easy to think like that.
You think, if only I could sell my products at a higher price, I'd be better off.
Well sure, yeah.
But that doesn't mean that if somehow you could raise prices across the board, that
would make everybody better off.
Now one thing that happened in 1933 with the dam breaking and all these possibilities becoming
real for the first time was that every crank and kook in the country rushed to Washington,
D.C. to sell his kooky program. And the new dealers, it's bizarre that Roosevelt's early
University advisors are called the brain trust.
They were called the brain trust because they were university professors from Columbia of
all places.
And I think we've got one of our speakers back there who's implicated as a result of
his own association with Columbia, shame, shame.
But Raymond Moley and Adolf Burley and Mr. Tugwell, Rexford Tugwell, had all had some
connection with Columbia University, as had the sainted Roosevelt himself.
So they got together and advised him, along with General Johnson, prior to his election
and just afterwards before the inauguration and the press with its usual cleverness designated
this group of insiders the brain trust. Well, if you go back and look at the kind of advice
they were giving Roosevelt, you discover that these brainy guys were as clueless as anyone
could be. They didn't have any idea about how economies work. Now sometimes people excuse
I used them by looking back and saying, well, nobody knew what to do.
Everybody was confused.
Well, no doubt there was a lot of confusion.
And in fact, if you look at who signed petitions
of various sorts in 1933 and 34 supporting cookie programs,
you'll find distinguished economists signing those things.
I mean, Frank Knight and Henry Simons
and people who we would think are the less cranky
of American economists were acting crankily at the time.
But basically Roosevelt's advisors were nitwits.
They didn't have any idea about what causes depressions,
what can bring about recoveries.
They didn't know how economies work.
and one of them, Rexford Tugwell, was just a wannabe central planner, a man who was one of those who thought, well, look at what the Soviets have done, isn't it drawl, we should do that too, so this is the kind of advice he's getting to begin with and among the cranks who rushed to Washington was one Professor George Warren, a professor
of Agricultural Economics at Cornell University,
a man who had done excellent work
collecting statistical data on the history of prices.
Well, he was a good gopher.
He could go back and find price data,
but he was a clueless economist.
In the course of collecting data,
he had reached the conclusion that
if you change the price of gold,
You can change the price of everything.
Well, it seemed to him that gold prices
and prices of commodities in general
seem to have moved together historically.
He was a price guy.
And so he came to Washington, he said,
Mr. President, he said,
we all know the economy needs reflation.
We need to raise prices
to get out of this terrible depression.
and all you have to do is raise the price of gold
and you'll see that all the other prices follow.
And that was the impetus for going off gold,
which is followed by the treasury's effort over about it,
one year's time in 1933 and into the spring of 1934
of pegging the price of gold
and they would actually go into Roosevelt each week or so
and say, well, Mr. President, what would you like the price of gold to be this week?
He'd say, oh, well, let's see, how about $28.50 this week?
And he kept putting it higher and higher
and the treasury kept raising the price
and the old price was $20.67 an ounce
and of course gold was flowing to the treasury
because it was paying a higher price for it
and eventually they got it up to $35 an ounce
and Roosevelt says, okay, that's good enough.
The law allowed me to raise the gold price 60%
and now we've got it up 59%.
So let's stop there.
So this was a devaluation against all currencies
still pegged to gold, which a number were at that time.
It was supported by farmers
who thought it would help them sell their crops abroad
because it made the dollar cheaper
in terms of French francs and other gold-pegged currencies.
But one thing it certainly did not do
was it didn't do what George Warren said.
It didn't raise all prices along with it.
Prices came up a little bit, maybe five or 6% in 1934,
and then prices in general hardly changed
for the rest of the 1930s.
They were just stuck down at that low level
to which they had fallen in the early 30s.
But this is characteristic of the idiotic kinds
of things that were done in the New Deal.
Roosevelt, who himself was clueless about economics,
had the idea that what the public wanted
was for the government to do something.
That may have even been the origin of that expression,
do something and so he he actually defended his policies by by saying that well we could have done nothing we could have just accepted the depression and allowed the suffering to continue but we we were more humane than that and we felt obliged to try something and if that didn't work try something else in other words close your eyes
and try to pin the tail on the donkey.
And somewhere out there,
the donkey of recovery will be discovered.
Now, along the way,
the New Deal enacted programs
that brought about a tremendous change
Tremendous change in the relative importance of state and local governments and the federal government.
This chart shows the proportions of all non-military government spending.
So, for example, back here in 1902, state spending accounted for something like 12% of all government non-military spending.
National accounted for like about 28% and so forth.
and so forth. As you can see, prior to the Great Depression, local governments were the big deals in the United States.
That's where most of the government activity was. Of course, government was much smaller in those days,
and local governments took care of such things as streets and roads and education and the big items,
the big items of those times.
State governments did practically nothing in those days.
The national government had already begun
to take some actions in the civilian realm,
but still it was a small operation
compared to local governments, cities and counties.
Now notice this continues to be the case
right up to 1932.
These data don't exist every year.
That's why they're not continuous.
But if you compare the situation in 1932
with the situation in 1934,
you'll see that's where the great shift took place.
That's when this national government share leaps here,
At the same time, the local government share is leaping here, and they're crossing over in magnitude.
By the time we've got into the late 30s, matters have been consolidated in a completely different way.
Now the national government is the big enchilada for government spending,
and the state and local governments have fallen to relatively much lower proportions.
In fact, matters were worse than that in terms of centralization, because during the New Deal, a number of programs were enacted with provisions for what is sometimes called cooperative administration.
Take, for example, State Unemployment Insurance Programs, they're state programs, okay?
If you want to collect unemployment benefits, you go to the Alabama Department of Employment
or whatever you call it here and collect your dole.
Well, why do we blame that on the federal government?
Well, in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, I beg your pardon, in the Social Security Act of 1935 was a provision for creating unemployment insurance at the state level.
The federal government set some standards for the program, it invited states to set up these programs,
and it provided that a tax would be placed on employers to finance the program, equal to 3% of the payroll.
If a state did establish an unemployment insurance program, 90% of that tax money would be returned to the state.
Otherwise, the tax would still be imposed and it would simply be removed from the state and given to other states to finance their unemployment insurance program.
Well, you can't imagine a state politician who is going to stand by and let the federal government come and take away 2.7% of all the payrolls in his state when he could keep that money in the state and also take credit for putting in place an unemployment insurance program.
So this is a no-brainer for state politicians and they all immediately proceeded to establish these programs.
Now the money that's spent is part of what's being measured here in this state proportion.
But this is imposed as it were.
This is an offer a state couldn't refuse from Uncle Sam.
And a number of other programs were created similar to that.
So cooperatively administered programs also were an aspect of centralizing political and legal authority in the national government.
The second New Deal, much of which took place in 1935,
if we go back, see what happened then.
The National Labor Relations Act was a centerpiece of this.
Back here in the National Industrial Recovery Act had been a provision requiring employers to bargain collectively.
And that had been the beginning of that kind of involvement by the national government.
When that act was declared unconstitutional in 1935, Congress hastened to more or less
reenact the labor provisions, only to extend them and create a much bigger federal role
in labor management relations.
And here, the provision was for elections among workers to decide whether they wanted
to have union representation, overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, a number
of restraints placed on employers to keep them from fighting off unions, and they could
not refuse to bargain collectively with a union that had been established according
According to the rules of this law, and this is still in force, although amended a number of times since.
So this has been the foundation for encouraging unionization.
The union membership grew between 1935 and 1940 from something in the neighborhood of 5 million to about 10 million.
So it doubled, and then it increased another 50 percent during the war.
and finally the the law was amended in 1947 by something called the Taft-Hartley Act
to take some of the sharper edges off of it and make it somewhat less favorable to unionization
and not long after that unionization peaked in this country it's been declining more or less ever
since but the unions and the New Deal especially the CIO unions the industrial unions were very
very closely linked. The politicos could use the unions as voters, as organizers, as mobsters,
as whatever they could do best in the service of reelection. And so they showed their gratitude
right here and set that in motion. The Social Security Act was the other big item and of
course that's still the albatross around the neck of American society which only gets heavier
with the passage of time. And that eventually was amended with Medicare and Medicaid in 1965
And now, I suppose this year, these glorious pro-market Republicans will add prescription
insurance for all of us old geezers.
But that's the beginning.
We've got some other things that are important economically, but we don't have time to discuss
them all here.
The turning point in the second New Deal that's important to remember is that the Baruch
gang was more or less shoved aside by that time, and the government turned very hostile
toward private enterprise in general.
The Baruch gang, they're businessmen.
They're not against business, they just want to cartelize it.
These guys that got Roosevelt's ear and assumed positions of special policy making importance
from 1935 onward were just hostile to business in general.
Somebody once said, James Burnham said, they are people who would like to run the world.
They think they can run the world.
Now, they were largely lawyers.
Imagine living in a world run by lawyers.
It's preposterous.
And Roosevelt himself discovered that in 1940 when he needed to prepare for war again.
And so at that point, he checked these guys for the most part.
1935 and 1940, they called the tune. These are people like Tom Corcoran, Ben Cohen, James Landis,
William O. Douglas, the sainted Frankfurter, who was the daddy of them all. Law teacher, right? These
guys are cranked out of Harvard like sausages and sucked down by Brandeis and Frankfurter to DC and
Imposed in Policy-Making Positions, and they start writing things like the Public Utility
Holding Company Act, which Corker and Cohen wrote, and numerous others.
So here we've got Harvard lawyers remaking the world.
They hate business.
They hate businessmen.
They think the world should be run by regulatory commissions populated by them and their pals.
Now, for some reason, historians have failed to put any weight on the fact that this kind
of government frightened businessmen.
What's wrong?
I did some work a few years ago in which I tried to find information to confirm that
Investors were extremely frightened by the second new dealers and I went out
looking through poll data and I found a lot of interesting things. One doesn't
want to make too much of these polls but at the same time one can't just dismiss
them out of hand. Polling was a new phenomenon in the 1930s. It really started
around the middle of the 1930s. And the particular poll I have displayed here in the center is
from a Fortune magazine poll of executives of corporations taken in November 1941 just
before the United States entered the war. And the question was which of the following
One comes closest to being your prediction of the kind of economic structure with which
this country will emerge after the war.
You see, they're already talking about after the war.
We're not quite in it, but everybody with a brain knows that this is just a matter of
time.
So you could say, well, we expect a system of free enterprise restored very much along
the pre-war lines with modifications to take care of conditions then current.
27% of the people thought that's what they could look forward to after the war.
Oh, by the way, they all knew that during the war there'd be all kinds of controls and interventions.
So they're looking ahead.
What happens after the war?
And of course, their idea of what happens after the war is conditioned partly by how
the war might affect matters, but largely by how things have been going in recent years.
So this is kind of a reflection of the attitudes that Second New Deal has brought about in
business executives.
What about an economic system in which government will take over many public services formerly
under private management, but still leave many opportunities for private enterprise?
Okay, 52%.
Now that's a bigger government they're looking forward to, but not one that's crushed every
aspect of private enterprise.
But the striking thing to me is how many selected option three or four. Option three was that
after the war we'll have a semi-socialized society in which there will be very little
room for the profit system to operate. And 37 percent of these business executives thought
that was the best scenario. And four percent looked forward to a complete economic dictatorship
along fascist or communist lines. So add those two up and you've got over 40% of the business
executives are thinking government is going to basically take over economic affairs. Well,
who wants to invest in a situation like that? And the answer is, so far as long-term investment
is concerned, hardly anybody. And so when you look at the way the New Deal affected
the course of economic recovery, of course the recovery is very weak. It never recovers.
Finally, military spending starts pumping up the economy in 1940 and you get the illusion
of Prosperity, but it's only an illusion because private production never recovered to even
close to the 1929 level until after World War II.
Now what I've got up here is a little more complicated, but it's not too hard to explain
what it has to do.
When I would tell this story to people, especially my economics colleagues out there in the mainstream,
and the mainstream, they would say, ah, baloney.
You know, you can say these people were scared to invest, but that can't be it.
That's not in any of our models.
Who knows what people will say to polls?
Who knows? They're just blowing hot air.
What do you expect from Republican tycoons?
Well, there is something to the challenge.
Put your money where your mouth is.
So can we find information or evidence that shows us how people put their money?
And the answer is, of course.
These businessmen were dealing in financial markets.
And what I've got here is evidence taken from the bond market.
I went out and I found the yields on corporate bonds of the highest grade.
And there's a series of these measured in the first quarter of every year going way back.
And then I took the ratio of the yield on a bond that matures in one year and the yield
on a bond that matures five years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years in the future.
This is, in economics, this is called a yield spread.
You can draw it another way and it's called a yield curve.
What you see back here between 1926 where I started and 1934 is that there is no yield
spread to speak of.
They're all tracking along the same magnitude.
The yield on a bond due in a year is approximately the same as the yield on a bond due in five
But what you see between the first quarter of 1934 and the first quarter of 1935 that is with the onset of the second New Deal and staying at that high level until 1942, when it comes back down and this mountain we've built here collapses back on itself, is a big difference between the yield on a bond and the yield on a bond.
Do farther in the future. This is a representation of what economists call
the risk premium. The risk premium. Why should I get a higher yield on
holding a bond that won't mature for five years than one that won't mature
until one year from now? The answer is I'm uncertain about the payoff. For one
year, I think things won't change that much in the next year. I'm fairly
5 years? If I'm uncomfortable with that for any reason, about the real value of the money that's promised by the bond, either because I think there may be default, my return may be taxed, there may be inflation that lowers the real value of the nominal amount promised by the bond, any of those reasons will go into a risk premium, means I won't pay as much attention to that.
for the bond as I otherwise would.
And bidding down the price makes the yield higher on this bond.
So this little mountain I've shown you here
tells you that exactly corresponding
with the second new deal was a huge bidding up
of the risk premiums prevailing in the financial markets.
If this isn't putting their money where their mouths were,
I don't know what is.
I've shown this to various people. This comes from an article I published in 1997, and so far no one has come forward to knock it down. I'm waiting.
Many people, when I talk about this, quarrel with it on one ground or another.
Mainstream economists have any number of ways to think up bizarre alternative explanations.
But frankly, I think mine suggests itself not only because that's what these data look like but because this evidence is so much in accord with so much other evidence of the kind that one can read from history.
So, what the second New Deal did was prolong the depression, prolong the suffering of Americans
who were unable to find a good job, were unable to operate their businesses successfully,
and in some cases, hardly able to feed their families.
This is the great, compassionate Roosevelt, the one who stirred the hearts of the ordinary
The one whose picture went on their walls. Even when I was a kid, people still had Roosevelt's portrait tacked up on their walls.
Grateful for all he had done for them and the country.
And what he had done for them is besides helping to destroy a good deal of what was good and decent and valuable about the American political economy,
he had kept them impoverished for years longer than they needed to remain in that condition.
condition. So it's an irony of American history and historiography that Roosevelt
and the New Deal have come down to us as they have, but I think it's just what you
might expect if you remember that the historians are the heirs of progressivism.
Well I'll stop and take questions at this point.
Any Roosevelt defenders in the room?
Yes, sir.
Not a defender, but would you be willing to tap a little further into the causes?
Well, of the American engagement, certainly we have to hold Roosevelt himself and his close advisors accountable for that.
that they worked very hard to get the country into the war that's that's no
longer an outrageous claim or statement I think even the mainstream historians
now recognize that the difference is that although they they admit that they
make the judgment that that was a fine thing that we needed to be in that war so
Well, thank God that Roosevelt was out there leading us where we needed to go.
The 32 speeches gave no indication of this.
Oh yes, the comment is about Roosevelt's speeches in 1932.
And no, they didn't foretell any of this at all.
He campaigned to criticizing Herbert Hoover for not balancing the budget
and for spending too much on government employees.
He gave no indication that he would have been in the gold standard, that he would
embark on this frenzy of government regulation, nothing of the sort.
Not that specific, but his 1932 inaugural address when he said we are now a poor economy and we're going to have to change our procedures of doing things differently.
Yeah, he was already elected then. Once he was elected, no, his inaugural speech, which, you know,
which he said, we have nothing to fear but me. No, that's not it. It was, it was fear itself.
But that speech is interesting in many respects. It's just one of the more memorable speeches in
American History, and it's full of military metaphors and threats. Roosevelt says, I will call on people to respond as a disciplined army, you know, we together under my leadership, we can fight this thing. And if Congress should refuse to act as required, I will act.
He said that very plainly. In other words, if dictatorship is what it takes, I will be the dictator.
It's as plain as anything could be. And yet, as I say, people have found that a very stirring speech, it's always claimed,
and this is an interesting project for some of you history students, it's always claimed that Roosevelt's speech
and his demeanor in the early days in office turned around the American bleakness of spirit
and gave Americans hope. Now, I wonder, how would you show that? Suppose you were a witness
in a court of law and, you know, your cross examiner said, okay, well, prove it. What's
What's your documentation? Show me he turned the American spirit into euphoria from bleakness.
I don't know. I mean, we've got some people who liked him, and we've got the historians
who say this, but I frankly would like to see some real evidence that he produced a
reversal of the American spirit.
One of the things that I think about is, if I was one of these guys who was involved in this, I was sitting in the room, you know, listening to all these concoctions and all these things go on, you know, just maybe from a different perspective, obviously, I would be wondering, where is it that a bureaucrat is truly coming from in his heart that makes him follow through with this stuff?
What is the truth with this? Is it power? Is it that he's accumulating personal wealth?
What is it that makes them perpetuate this thing? Obviously you can see that somebody like Roosevelt is going to be caught up in his image and his, you know, how history is going to seem and all that.
But what about these guys who are actually implementing this?
They believed that they could run the world better than the market system, they believed in themselves, they didn't see that it was all that tough, they took themselves to be public-spirited men, they looked at the capitalist class as exploiters and cheaters and robbers, and so why couldn't they do it better? It was done so badly by the master class that had held sway before them.
Well, in the first New Deal, the first New Deal was a plotted by business, particularly
big corporate business almost across the board. But these guys were looking for cartelization
as an answer to their problem.
Henry Harriman was the head of the Chamber of Commerce at the time.
I mean, if his antecedents had seen him then, they would have rolled in their grave, I think,
at least a little bit.
But these guys were not proponents of competition to begin with.
They were people who were very happy to look to the state to help them organize cooperation.
That was the watchword of the day.
They didn't talk about cartelization, they talked about cooperation, and they talked about
putting it into wasteful competition, cutthroat competition, and so forth.
And the master of this kind of lingo was Hugh Johnson, a very flamboyant character who did
a lot of destructive things, but he was well worth having just for the language he used.
There are many ways, I think, to understand the staying power of a lot of these
policies and some of them are just just political mechanics. When you create a
program you create strong proponents of it by by the very act of its creation.
Somebody's going to run it and those people are going to want to continue
running it and they're going to be the people who every day collecting their pay
act to preserve it and expand it and they have the most information about it.
They're the people best able to defend it with the greatest incentive to defend it.
So create a government program at your peril because chances are you'll never be able to
get rid of it even if it's vastly unpopular with the people and even with Congress.
But besides that, one I think needs to understand that the American people went 15 years from
1930-1945 enduring constant national emergency and constant government efforts to deal with them.
And so almost an entire generation was softened out, beaten down and accustomed to having government take care of a variety of things
that used to be the preserve of private initiative and decision.
So, you educated a new cohort of young people who found this normal, because they had never known anything else that they understood,
and you changed the minds of a lot of other people by cutting them in on some kind of real or fictitious benefit they got from it.
So, the ideology of the American people changed greatly between 1929 and 1946,
because of the experience of those years and the way it had been presented to them,
propagandized to them, and just the way they had lived it.
In a way, you can't be a good walker if you never walk.
If you sit in a chair for 15 years, you'll never be a strong walker when you finally stand up.
Americans had lost their muscles for acting as free men, and they never got them back.
Do you see that as somewhat similar to what they did in wiping out a whole generation of people?
Well, no, I don't see it as similar in that sense.
I mean, the Russians literally annihilated human beings.
But what the New Deal did was annihilate the human spirit.
I'll stop there.
The Theory of Money and Credit