Sniping

No Ramos and Compean?

Oh, and about the Citigroup bailout…Your dollar bill is now worth about a quarter, Americans. Thank you, federal government.

Give these guys a squirt gun and they whip out a flamethrower…That Constitution thingy? Oh, who reads that?

Speaking of, several of you know I’m presently reading (among several other things) Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. Carry it with you to your polling place next time around; the book sure garners some interesting expressions.

Dahlings, I cannot recommend this book to you enough. Though hardly bedtime reading, it’s wonderfully written (reminiscent of Langguth’s enthralling Patriots, just gloomily daunting instead of exhilarating). Contrary to popular belief, the “forgotten man” is not the one spoken of by FDR (or BHO), the underdog who just can’t get ahead, “at the bottom of the economic pyramid”. No. The forgotten man is, in fact, the one who pays to alleviate the suffering of another, at the behest of others. His opinion is rarely, if ever, solicited; his pockets are, however, lightened. Shlaes shares with us the words of Yale philosopher William Graham Sumner, who realized and named the forgotten man nearly 50 years before the Depression:

As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose tp get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law proposes to determine…what A, B, and C shall do for X.” But what about C? There was nothing wrong with A and B helping X. What was wrong was the law, and the indenturing of C to the cause. C was the forgotten man, the man who paid, “the man who is never thought of.

Frighteningly, the policies enacted by Hoover and FDR (and FDRs progressivist buddies) are disturbingly familiar, and that’s not because any of us were taught the real story of the Depression in school (one has to listen to talk radio for that). Government meddling and “experimentation” was rampant, and resulted in a decade-long Depression ended only by World War II.

If anyone needs to read this book, it’s Barack Obama. His entire team, in fact. This sad period of America’s economic history is screaming that our present course is one toward destruction and misery. Of course, there are those asserting that Mr. Obama is himself a radical, even a Marxist. Some of his statements and policy ideas certainly seem to point in that direction, of course, and if this is the truth, trust me, he won’t really care about the results of his actions; his only concern is that everything be “fair” and “equal”. Fairly and equally miserable.

Though only a quarter of the way through the book, I have one bone to pick with Shlaes: her suggestion that FDR was not an ideologue. I’m not so sure. It’s been a while since I finished Johnson’s History of the American People, but I seem to recall that FDR had an intense dislike for business (the feeling was reciprocated). Additionally, the following is from Shlaes’ book:

Roosevelt…talked like Hoover about how “government, of all kinds, big and little, be made solvent.” He complained about high taxes: “government costs too much.” On the other hand, he made expansive statements whose import was hard to gauge. The country, he believed, had grown too fast: beyond “our natural and normal growth.” The problem was that there had been “an era of selfishness.” There existed “throughout the nation men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy” of the last years. These people “look to us for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth.” (! National? Beg pardon?)

…The Depression, FDR said, was the result of “lack of honor among men in high places” and “crooks”. More generally, he assigned blame to a moral fault: national greed. “Let us be frank in acknowledgment of the truth that many amongst us have made obeisance to Mammon, that the profits of speculation, the easy road without toil, have lured us from the barricades.”

Familiar much? Just reading of Roosevelt’s pursuing Mellon through the courts for tax evasion, as if Roosevelt were an apocalyptic bearer of righteous, fiery vengeance against the industrious, makes me wonder about his commitment to the triumph of the public sector over that of the private.

At any rate…do pick this one up. It’s now available in paperback, so it’ll only set you back two burnt lattes from Starbuck’s.