FDR & Wonderboy: The Scary Parallels

I've been reading Amity Schlaes' excellent book, "The Forgotten Man, A New History of The Great Depression."

In it, Ms. Schlaes carefully documents many of FDR's motivations and confused approaches to areas such as monetary policy and the gold standard, the NRA, TVA and the power industry.

Two things struck me about FDR's activities which seem to be shared by our current First Rookie.

First, FDR often had no clear conviction for his actions. For example, on monetary policy, he first disavowed leaving the gold standard, then formally severed the link, and, then, when this made gold price setting unable to affect the dollar's value, he returned the dollar to gold convertibility, albeit at a much higher $35/ounce, rather than the $20/ounce or so it had once held.

Schlaes' description of FDR's willy-nilly changes of mind to his own representatives to a gold conference he convened in London would be funny, if it were not so sad.

The other aspect of Roosevelt's activities which I had not realized was that the entire NRA was accomplished by executive orders. Congress had no say whatsoever in the autocratic agency which attempted to organize and regulate the entire US economy. Schlaes notes that, as of the mid-1930s, the NRA's regulations ran to some 10,000 pages, more than the entire Federal Register from the Republic's founding, in 1789, to that time.

One gets the sense that Wonderboy is also devoid of any clear sense of economic direction in his own deliberations. He demands a nearly-$800B stimulus bill, all to be borrowed, then claims his healthcare bill will not increase the deficit.

Too, as FDR did with his executive orders, Wonderboy has appointed a huge array of 'czars,' and is running the auto sector and supporting banks without meaningful Congressional oversight.

It's scary how much of FDR's approaches and overall game plan of explicit socialization our current president seems to have borrowed.

But, in contrast, there's hope, as well. Schlaes details how the tide eventually turned against FDR, as I will relate in an upcoming post.