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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: haqihana who wrote (2745)	12/21/2005 12:33:55 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

FDR was a trust fund richie who was inculcated into the socialist dogma. He spent his Presidency instituting incremental pieces of it. The country was suffering a predictable depression. The percentage of the population that were adults in the prime of their productivity fell precipitously at the end of the 1920's. While all of the programs instituted to combat the depression were compassionate, they hardly helped to revive the economy. One of the important lessons from that experience is that the "self interested" tightening of import restrictions was counter productive. The loosening of our porous borders have bought the US a couple of additional years before history repeats itself. We are likely to experience a depression or at a minimum a deep recession some time in the next decade. Whether FDR was manipulating events to the degree conspiracy theorists suggest or not is not something I care to speculate on. He is the great icon for Democrats. Democrats condone FDR's use of firing squads to execute German spies, but they want to investigate President Bush for using the same kind of Constitutional powers that Carter and Clinton exercised. They say that FDR was good, and that Preside Bush is bad when he does the same things. "The broadcasts of some person, or persons, under the name of Tokyo Rose, were intended to make us fearful with a defeatist attitude, and unhappy with the government. That is, indeed, what the liberals are doing now." Yep.

To: haqihana who wrote (2745)	12/21/2005 3:53:02 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

Do right-wing or left-wing academics have a "narrower tent"? This paper provides copious results from a 2003 survey of academics. We analyze the responses of 1208 academics from six scholarly associations (in anthropology, economics, history, legal and political philosophy, political science, and sociology) with regard to their views on 18 policy issues. The issues include economic regulations, personal-choice restrictions, and military action abroad. We find that the academics overwhelmingly vote Democratic and that the Democratic dominance has increased significantly since 1970. A multivariate analysis shows strongly that Republican scholars are more likely to land outside of academia. On the 18 policy questions, the Democratic-voter responses have much less variation than do the Republicans. The left has a narrow tent. The Democratic and Republican policy views of academics are somewhat in line with the ideal types, except that across the board both groups are simply more statist than the ideal types might suggest. Regarding disciplinary consensus, we find that the discipline with least consensus is economics. We do a cluster analysis, and the mathematical technique sorts the respondents into groups that nicely correspond to familiar ideological categories: establishment left, progressive, conservative, and libertarian. The conservative group and the libertarian group are equal in size (35 individuals, each), suggesting that academics who depart from the leftist ranks are as likely to be libertarian as conservative. We also find that conservatives are closer to the establishment left than they are to the libertarians. That is by Daniel Klein and Charlotta Stern, here is the paper. marginalrevolution.com Link to paper swopec.hhs.se. Thanks to Tim Fowler for finding this.