"brings Roosevelt squarely into the post-Lewinsky media age" that's inspiring.

If you have ever read in history of the FDR era, you would know (although you might not be willing to admit it)that in the 30's FDR's initiatives helped save this country from turning to Communism. People were desperate and FDR tried and did help this country begin to recover. The Communist Party already had a foothold in this country in the early 30's and people were just desperate enough to turn to their philosophy. Read the Preamble to our Constitution. One of the purposes stated for our government is "to promote the general welfare." There are people like you who believe it is wrong for government to try and help improve the lives of the less wealthy in this country. Our Founding Fathers didn't feel that way.

His economic policies dragged out the Depression about 2 years longer than necessary and now we're stuck w/his definition of "general welfare."

And we're in deep, deep debt.

Yes, I remember my Granparents telling me about the CPUSA marching down Pennsylvania Avenue and how the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks went at it hammer and tongs. We teetered on the brink...

The debt is actually quite small, but he did prolong and deepen the Depression.

The left has always been brilliant about using the language of double speak. The word, welfare, wasn't used by chance. It was used so unbelievably jejune people like barbara tate could read the Constitution and come up with a statement like the one above. There are ever so many interpretations of the Constitution which explain what a word meant when the Constitution was written and how is has been distorted to its current meaning. Welfare is one of them.

Taking public charity had traditionally been referred to as the dole and worse. Public housing was called the poor house and worse. In order to change peoples hearts and minds and make "living on the kindness of strangers" into an entitlement and palatable to taxpayers, new positive names were needed for the old nasty ones.

The dole was reborn as food stamps. Stores gave shoppers stamps redeemable for gifts when food stamps were first introduced, hence the bogus food stamps were offered as the moral equivalency to the bona fide shopping inducement of redeemable stamps. Plastic is what everybody uses today, so food stamps are now doled out by "credit" card too. The poor house has had many incarnations, public housing, the projects, subsidized housing, low and moderate income housing and who knows how many others euphemisms, but it is the poor house nevertheless.

The poor wretches who live on the taxpayers dime should thank barbara and people like her who are smug in the knowledge that they are helping the downtrodden. What they may be too naïve to understand is that they have been and are continuing to encourage a permanent underclass of people who have been taught they are too dumb and too incompetent to take care of themselves.

It's long past time for the Roosevelt years to be exposed as a decade or more of lies and I don't mean only about his health. The FDR documentary on the History channel was painful to watch. The announcer intoned that "Roosevelt kept us in the dark so he could bring us into the light" repeatedly. It was nauseating and another perfect example of double speak.

Roosevelt was every bit as responsible as Stalin for the 75 years of Soviet slavery and the millions of death after WW2. If he hadn't died finally and Truman wasn't able to move in to end the war in Japan quickly and implement the Marshall Plan, the Soviets would have continued their march across Europe and the world would have be in a vastly worse place than it is now.

That actually would have been preferable.

I doubt that Barbara Tate has any idea what our Founding Fathers understood the proper role of the federal government in "improving the lives of the less wealthy in this country" to be. She apparently has not searched the Constitution very thoroughly for how it defines "general welfare."

As for FDR, he hid his disability primarily because he knew it was a political liability. He kept everyone in the dark because "of fear itself" (and for good reason in that day and age; I don't fault him for it).

Dave:

Fortunately WWII was unlosable and he died quickly, otherwise his deteriorating health could have been even more catastrophic than just contributing to Stalin fleecing him at summits.

Yeah, all those people without work, food or homes were just feckless commies.

Harry:

Exactly my point. There were no revolutionaries. The notion that FDR "saved capitalism" is imbecilic.

The "Great Society", the national bureacratic/administrative state, housing projects, food stamps,federal minimum wage regs, social security, special interest subsidies (agriculture), wage and price controls, organized labor monopolies, keynesian deficit spending and confiscatory tax rates at the margin as well as 'living constitutionalism' are the legacies of FDR.
What a guy! In retrospect, which of these theoretical positions made law are not ivory tower idiocies? Harry?

Tom:

You haven't been paying enough attention. Harry thinks it didn't go far enough--because the Court stopped the NRA and other measures. Indeed, he thinks the socialism part of Nazism was worthwhile.

Harry those poor people without work weren't feckless communists yet, but Roosevelt and his cronies in the U.S. and the USSR were trying very hard to make them so.

Check out, The Truth about the "Hollywood Ten" By Art Eckstein, FrontPageMagazine.com | April 18, 2005

"Party members boasted of “sneaking” Marxist dogma into otherwise bland Hollywood films ... Ring Lardner, Jr. ... slipped frequent anti-capitalist messages into a show (Robin Hood) set in medieval England. His purpose, he said, was to subvert the younger generation’s beliefs in free enterprise."

It's a long article, but it'll be an eye-opener for those who only know the CW about FDR.

But trying futilely.

Food stamps and minimum wages are good ideas, assuming that one prefers a bit of socialism to people dying.

The ugly truth is that Roosevelt was part and parcel of a world wide trend to fascism (which I will use as the global name for anti-liberal syndicalist theories such as nazism, communism and fascism that derived from the seminal works of Proudhon and Sorel). He ran on a platform of classical liberalism, but enacted a statist program, more modest indeed than Russia, Germany or Italy, but in the same line of thought.

Food stamps and agricultural price supports go hand in hand. Minimum wage regs hurt jobs by pricing out unskilled younger workers. The federal minimum wage is a political sop to organized labor. It is counter productive if one believes that working for a living is always better than not working. On the other hand, if one believes that government is more efficient than the market the tax rate should be 100% and all of our needs shall be provided for by Nancy Pelosi, Harry Waxman, John Kerry and Teddy the K. Current trust income tax regulations shall not be messed with, however.

Markets are more efficient than government, but the bigger picture is that human lifestyles and families are also less efficient than markets.
That's why societies consistantly choose safety nets over maximizing profits, when the masses have the power to do so.

One has to be very unskilled indeed to not be worth the minimum wage.
Although some jobs are lost at the margin, the effect is quite small, and all of the arguments along that line are about principle and philosophy, not real-world practices.

I always read the "general welfare" as talking about the general welfare. I.e., once the government starts handing out checks to specific people to improve their particular lives, it's no longer general welfare. Promoting good and fair laws, funding the police, securing our borders - that's promoting the general welfare. Cutting WIC checks isn't.

J. Tiberius K. :

Take a look at the Statistical Abstract of the U.S. sometime and check out what happens to black and white unemployment rates -- particularly among teenagers -- every time the feds hike the minimum.

"Human lifestyles and families are less efficient than markets". Perfect efficiency is not an available option nor should it be. Leftist economic measures only make things more difficult by adding restrictions to economic activity by satisfying special interests and protecting those interests from economic reality. That's what government does. The state does not operate under a principle of perfect, disinterested altruism. Where and when has it ever? Markets, allowed to operate freely will always be more just than economically detached bureacracies which must expand or die. Markets are not perfect, nothing is. Top down state run planned economies, by defintion divorced from market pressures, will always cause more harm than good over the intermediate to longer term. This is a plain and simple historically supported factual reality.

Please, also mention corporate handouts and wasteful largesse in the DOD in your litany of handouts. I'm tired of taking up the slack in tax revenues left vacant by corporate loopholes.
Corporate freeriding in our country is far more irksome then putting food in the mouths of kids. Feeding corporations is like stuffing more dessert into the mouth of a fat pig.

Please, also mention corporate handouts and wasteful largesse in the DOD in your litany of handouts. I'm tired of taking up the slack in tax revenues left vacant by corporate loopholes.
Corporate freeriding in our country is far more irksome then putting food in the mouths of kids. Feeding corporations is like stuffing more dessert into the mouth of a fat pig.

David T:

Of course. That's the best argument for a simplified tax code.

Tom C.:

The state does not operate under a principle of perfect, disinterested altruism.

No human organization does, including churches. However, markets have no altruism at all.

Markets, allowed to operate freely will always be more just than economically detached bureacracies...

Pure rubbish.
Markets are efficient, so if by "just" you mean "sink or swim", then the strong, the lucky, and the well-connected will survive, and the riff-raff will get what's comin' to 'em.
However, be sure not to contract a prolonged illness, or want to settle down and stop moving around chasing jobs...

Markets are good, they're not God-like.

Who described markets as 'god-like'? Folks acting in their own self-interest within a framework of ordered liberty and the rule of law will form networks of free associations with the object of strengthening their communities in order to promote the proper environment for families and enterprise. Strong communities are good for business. High taxes and regulations handed down from the central administrative state are more often than not counterproductive to the interests of real people operating in the real world. The one size fits all policy approach of the federeal government rarely works, causes more harm than good

Folks acting in their own self-interest within a framework of ordered liberty and the rule of law will form networks of free associations with the object of strengthening their communities in order to promote the proper environment for families and enterprise.

Exactly, which is why unions were formed, which led to minimum-wage laws.

Capital and management are concentrated, labor is diffused. Only when all sides are roughly equal can their be a "free association", otherwise, one has the freedom of a sharecropper.

Minimum wages strengthen the hand of employees.
If American society had minimum-wage laws and NO social safety nets, then I would agree that they were a bad idea, for in that instance, a dollar an hour would be better than starvation.