I posted the links already. I could find them and do it again, but you would just say the source is biased and you feel free to ignore it.
This isn't a matter of numerical data. A link to someone else's description or argument would not be very different than providing the same argument myself.
Well I could re-link to details of some of FDR's economic plans, but their commonly available history. Maybe you can do some of your own research instead of me having to do it again and again and again.
Start with looking in to the National Recovery Administration, the National Industrial Recovery Act.
Well OK I'll give you some links -
The New Deal
Both Franklin Roosevelt’s admirers and his detractors often think of his New Deal legacy as generally socialistic. Like the Progressive Era, the New Deal is widely misunderstood: it did indeed attack the free market, but often did so at the behest of corporate interests.
Such interests were largely behind the emergence of the National Recovery Administration, which exemplified FDR’s economic central planning. Far from being a purely egalitarian agency, the NRA was largely modeled after the policies of Mussolini, who had yet to be considered an enemy by most Americans, but rather was still seen as an inspiration by many. As John Flynn explained in his book, The Roosevelt Myth,
[Mussolini] organized each trade or industrial group or professional group into a state-supervised trade association. He called it a corporative. These corporatives operated under state supervision and could plan production, quality, prices, distribution, labor standards, etc. The NRA provided that in America each industry should be organized into a federally supervised trade association. It was not called a corporative. It was called a Code Authority. But it was essentially the same thing. These code authorities could regulate production, quantities, qualities, prices, distribution methods, etc., under the supervision of the NRA. This was fascism. The anti-trust laws forbade such organizations. Roosevelt had denounced Hoover for not enforcing these laws sufficiently. Now he suspended them and compelled men to combine.
Though the NRA intended to guarantee profits through mergers and price controls — forbidding smaller business from competing by offering better prices — big business, big labor, and most other initial supporters turned against the NRA when it became universally recognized as a complete failure. In 1935 the Supreme Court found it unconstitutional. Aside from the NRA, other New Deal measures epitomized naked corporatism. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration cartelized the farming industry, and Roosevelt’s farm subsidies and price supports have to this day helped to solidify a corporate stronghold in American agriculture.
fff.org
Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt
What FDR had in common with the other charismatic collectivists of the 30s
David Boaz | October 2007
reason.com
"The image of a strong leader taking direct charge of an economy during hard times fascinated observers abroad. Italy was one of the places that Franklin Roosevelt looked to for ideas in 1933. Roosevelt's National Recovery Act (NRA) attempted to cartelize the American economy just as Mussolini had cartelized Italy's. Under the NRA Roosevelt established industry-wide boards with the power to set and enforce prices, wages, and other terms of employment, production, and distribution for all companies in an industry. Through the Agricultural Adjustment Act the government exercised similar control over farmers. Interestingly, Mussolini viewed Roosevelt's New Deal as "boldly... interventionist in the field of economics." Hitler's nazism also shared many features with Italian fascism, including the syndicalist front. Nazism, too, featured complete government control of industry, agriculture, finance, and investment."
econlib.org
"Perhaps the most radical aspect of the New Deal was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), passed in June 1933, which created a massive new bureaucracy called the National Recovery Administration. Under the NRA, most manufacturing industries were suddenly forced into government-mandated cartels. Codes that regulated prices and terms of sale briefly transformed much of the American economy into a fascist-style arrangement, while the NRA was financed by new taxes on the very industries it controlled. Some economists have estimated that the NRA boosted the cost of doing business by an average of 40 percent — not something a depressed economy needed for recovery.
The economic impact of the NRA was immediate and powerful. In the five months leading up to the act’s passage, signs of recovery were evident: factory employment and payrolls had increased by 23 and 35 percent, respectively. Then came the NRA, shortening hours of work, raising wages arbitrarily, and imposing other new costs on enterprise. In the six months after the law took effect, industrial production dropped 25 percent. Benjamin M. Anderson writes, "NRA was not a revival measure. It was an antirevival measure . . . . Through the whole of the NRA period industrial production did not rise as high as it had been in July 1933, before NRA came in."[25]
The man Roosevelt picked to direct the NRA effort was General Hugh "Iron Pants" Johnson, a profane, red-faced bully and professed admirer of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Thundered Johnson, "May Almighty God have mercy on anyone who attempts to interfere with the Blue Eagle" (the official symbol of the NRA, which one senator derisively referred to as the "Soviet duck"). Those who refused to comply with the NRA Johnson personally threatened with public boycotts and "a punch in the nose."
There were ultimately more than 500 NRA codes, "ranging from the production of lightning rods to the manufacture of corsets and brassieres, covering more than 2 million employers and 22 million workers."[26] There were codes for the production of hair tonic, dog leashes, and even musical comedies. A New Jersey tailor named Jack Magid was arrested and sent to jail for the "crime" of pressing a suit of clothes for 35 cents rather than the NRA-inspired "Tailor’s Code" of 40 cents.
In The Roosevelt Myth, historian John T. Flynn described how the NRA’s partisans sometimes conducted "business":
The NRA was discovering it could not enforce its rules. Black markets grew up. Only the most violent police methods could procure enforcement. In Sidney Hillman’s garment industry the code authority employed enforcement police. They roamed through the garment district like storm troopers. They could enter a man’s factory, send him out, line up his employees, subject them to minute interrogation, take over his books on the instant. Night work was forbidden. Flying squadrons of these private coat-and-suit police went through the district at night, battering down doors with axes looking for men who were committing the crime of sewing together a pair of pants at night. But without these harsh methods many code authorities said there could be no compliance because the public was not back of it.[27]
mackinac.org
"Another chapter, “The Chicken Versus the Eagle,” takes us through the legal case of a Brooklyn band of brothers, the Schechters, whose name means “ritual butcher” in Yiddish, and whose business was the marketing of kosher chickens. In 1934, Roosevelt’s Justice Department prosecuted them under the National Recovery Administration’s Code of Fair Competition for the Live Poultry Industry of the Metropolitan Area in and About the City of New York, “a lengthy and forbidding document.” The code forbade, among other deleterious practices, so-called “straight killing,” which meant that “customers might select a coop or a half coop of chickens for purchase, but they did not ‘have the right to make any selection of particular birds.’ ” Not only did the code unleash upon their business a plague of ignorant and imperious government inspectors, the Schechters argued, but “they were busting in on an intimate private relationship: that of the small businessman with his customer.” In their first trial, the chicken venders were found guilty, fined, and sentenced to jail, and the circuit court rejected their appeal; but the Supreme Court, handing down judgment in 1935 in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, unanimously ruled that “the NRA had abused the Schechters, and other businesses, through unconstitutional ‘coercive exercise of the law-making powers.’ ”
newyorker.com
Also see
ibiblio.org
aei.org
cato.org
reason.com
mises.org |
