interesting timing of the book's release. should be helpful.

Yes but, he initiated Social Security, intimidated the 9 old men into rethinking their constitutional views and saddled the country with the machinery of the largely unaccountable administrative state. Statism was the wave of the future and FDR saved capitalism by implimenting our first version of the third way, taking the best from fascism and collectivism in order to create the 'permanent' Democratic majority and saving us from ourselves. How important was Eastern Europe in comparison when soviet propaganda merely desrcibed what many in the brain trust recomended in light of Stalin's justifiable paranoia and fear of capitalist encirclement. FDR was a putz.

It seems pretty safe to say that that we could have simply stood by and watched a weaker evil (Nazism) destroy a greater evil (Communisim) and then simply knocked over the Nazis after they did all our work for us.

What a massive destruction of human potential liberalism has wrought.

The New Deal made the Third Way necessary. It was not necessary itself.

Yesterday's third way was a compromise between ordered liberty and fascism. What's next? Practical ordered liberty supported through personal responsibility and the old-fashioned idea of civic virtue is possible. The supposed conflict with abstract security is false. Real security follows ordered liberty and the freedom it offers to succeed or fail. It order to be secure from failure one must not be free to try.

No, the Third Way is just a compromise between a wholly private welfare system and a wholly public one. The public won't tolerate the formewr and the latter isn't workable.

Think of it more as a continuum from liberty to fascism/socialism/collectivism. In the eary half of the 20th Century, it looked like the world was finally going to choose to follow the French Revolutionary route towards the latter. So the New Deal put us halfway between the two. Now the "Third Way" is putting up halfway between the New Deal and liberty, or only a quarter of the way from liberty. If done right, what follows will half that distance again, getting to the one-eight point. What's wrong with that kind of incrementalism, other than we are forcing most of this century to live under "the Thrid Way"?

But Roosevelt is still a putz.

The former worked just fine at one time. Shortsighted monetary and fiscal policies are the problems. As long as the central state maintains the powers to enact foolish policies the need for a welfare state will always be percieved to exist. It is a system of perversely structured incentives built on good intentions which accomplish little other than maintaining the power of the administraive state at an absurd cost relative to any real benefits.

You said it Tom and as I said in an earlier post, FDR and his leftie pals wanted the Soviets to win, so to that end we defeated their enemies, condoned their conquest of eastern Europe, told lies about their non-existent accomplishments, covered up their failures, looked the other way when Stalin murdered and pillaged and we kept doing it for fifty years right up to when it actually fell apart in front of our eyes.

Tom:

No, you can't take from the young to fund the old for even a generation without running into trouble.

oj-

Agreed. Although we've been doing it for 70 years. Tax consumption and eliminate taxes on savings and investment. Anyone for sensible incentives? The only entity not to benefit would be our friends in DC so I won't hold my breath. People too stupid to plan for the future in such a sensible policy environment would simply get what they desreve. The states and localities should take the responsibility at that point, as they did in the past. Maintaining security for stupidity is counter-productive. The trade off ain't worth it.

We've been running deficits for 70 years.

Tax people and put the money into accounts that they then invest. It's inefficient but comprehensive.

OJ:

I'm currently reading all three volumes of the Roosevelt-Churchill correspondence for a college project, and boy, is it telling. Even the editors of the correspondence essentially conclude that Roosevelt was gulled by the Soviets.

It's pretty astonishing that you normally have to read conservative-leaning historians or dig through primary sources to find out this information.

Whoops, wrong word choice -- not astonishing at all, really.

Actually, the national debt is older than the nation, although in the 1830s is got down so small -- on the order of $30,000 -- that it's kind of a mystery why they bothered.

FDR saved the United States. Not only did he preserve America as a democracy in the darkest days of the Depression, he was the architect of American superpower.

He had his faults, and made mistakes. It is alright to acknowledge them while still appreciating his great achievments.

For 20 million dead, Stalin expanded a few hundred miles west. 50 years later, his empire is shattered.

With less than 300,00 dead, the United States extended its influence all over the world. The US is more powerful than ever, and mainly through those institutions FDR developed.

By any measure, we scammed the Soviets silly.

Giving those Studebakers to Russia was the best thing that could have been done with them. A dead German was a dead German. Better the Red Army be killed for it than one of us.

I know OJ truly believes that WWIII should have been fought on May 10, 1945, but that is a minority opinion. The failure to keep Eastern Europe free of Soviet occupation is tragic, but not something that could be changed absent different fortunes in war.

There was never a threat to democracy. Only the Left believes that old canard because they don't much like American democracy in the first place.

Any president would have done as well, most better.