Now that Obamacare has slipped into the ocean trench that lies
just off the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, the president will
turn his full attention to the issue of jobs. This can mean only
one thing.
Now nobody’s job is safe.
Soon we will all be out on the street — in bread lines or
moving into makeshifts shelters that our government, out of the
kindness of its heart, has built for us. To add just a bit to the
line in the old Willy & Waylon song about Luckenbach, Texas,
it’s time to get back to the basics of life on the dole.
FDR liked to visit the boys living in Civil Conservation
Corps barracks. He had good time eating, joking, and making
little speeches. Maybe Barack will do the same for us. Visit us
in our shanty-towns, shoot some hoops, and flash that toothy
grin.
FDR appreciated the propaganda value of these visits.
Everyone looks so happy and content in their government-created
work camps. That was one of the things the CCC did — it created
endless footage for the sole purpose of singing its own praises
and paying homage to FDR. If you could look inside the mind of
the typical progressive, you would find those old news reels
playing an endless loop.
Only a couple of months ago, the president vowed that we
would “spend our way out of this recession.” Now he is singing a
new tune — calling for “austerity.” How is one to reconcile the
two sides of Mr. Obama’s newly adopted public persona — Mr.
Spendthrift and Mr. Austerity? Actually, there is no difficulty
here, because, either way, the president will decide
what needs to be done, with little or no input from the private
sector.
We may go ahead, for instance, with a multi-billion dollar
light rail system not because it makes economic or business
sense, but, far more importantly, because it has been “the Number
One issue back on the Obama Citizen Suggestion Site.”
Let me relate a story that I believe sheds some light on
the other side of Mr. Obama: the hard, flinty, austere side. It
concerns the friend of a friend, who left Wall Street to become a
key member of the General Motors rescue team put together by
Steve Rattner last spring.
When this man went into the Oval Office for the first time,
he tried to engage the president in some friendly chit-chat,
saying that he had a basketball court in his backyard and a bunch
of athletic children who loved to play the game. “We have nine
basketballs at our house,” he boasted. Big mistake! Mr. Obama
fixed the investment banker with an icy stare, and said, “No one
should have more than one basketball.”
That’s it. That is Obamanomic austerity. The same president
who wants to ration health care — things like stents and hip
replacements — also wants to ration basketballs. There should be
no more than one basketball per household — and perhaps no more
than one hip replacement for every 1,000 people between the ages
of 60 and 69. And fewer for those between the less ages of 70 and
79, who are that much closer to the end. Let the government
decide.
That’s austerity, all right. You don’t have to be a
proponent of small government to favor austerity. Communists and
socialists have been doing it for years. So, too, have the
mullahs. They are excellent practitioners of the same kind of
austerity that sneers at free choice and reliably produces shoddy
products and grinding poverty.
Price controls, shortages, queuing and rationing — all
those are key elements in the socialist tool kit. Since this
administration was already prepared to ration health care , CO2
emissions and incomes (with severe tax penalties for anyone
making more than $200,000 or $250,000 a year), why not ration
jobs as well.
FDR did so. He called it “work sharing.” He set out to
stop people from working a full week by forcing
employers to reduce the number of hours per worker. Thus, he
deliberately sought to limit jobs to less than one per
person.
In his book How Capitalism Saved America, the
economist Tom DiLorenzo provides a vivid description of how FDR’s
government went out of its way to discourage and penalize work.
The government created a bureaucratic monstrosity called the
National Recovery Administration (NRA) which required every
business owner to observe a minimum wage, a maximum work week,
and to take other nonproductive steps to spread work around.
DiLorenzo quotes another writer (John T. Flynn) on the effect of
such rules and regulations:
(Code enforcement police) roamed through the garment
district like storm troopers. They would 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 sin of sewing together a pair of
pants at night.
DiLorenzo writes:
The first New Deal was essentially a scheme to turn the
U.S. economy into one massive, government-run system of
industrial and agricultural cartels. At a time when
underemployment or unemployed of resources (including labor
resources) was of tragic proportions, the focus of government
was to restrict output and employment even further
with supply-reducing cartel schemes and limitations on hours
worked.
In her best-selling book The Forgotten Man: A New
History of the Great Depression, Amity Shlaes paints a
similar picture:
Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration, created in
1933, pulled wages up when perishing companies could not afford
it; come 1935, the Wagner Act gave unions more bargaining
power, forcing further wage increases on companies. Roosevelt’s
multiple tax increases caused businesses to postpone
investment. Especially counter-productive was FDR’s
“undistributed profits tax,” which punished firms for being
cautious and forced them to disgorge cash at the worst possible
moment.
From first-hand observation of the same events,
Winston Churchill, then out of government and writing furiously
to replenish his depleted financial resources, penned a long and
fascinating story on FDR and his administration that appeared
December 29, 1934, issue of Colliers. While bending over
backwards to present the most flattering possible picture of the
president, Churchill did allow some real criticism — softened
somewhat by humor and an arch tone — to creep into the article.
He wrote:
(British) trade unions have grown to manhood and power
amid an enormous company of counterchecks and
consequential corrections. But to raise American trade unionism
from its previous condition to industrial sovereignty by a few
sweeping decrees may easily confront both the trade unions and
the United States with problems which for the time being will
be at once paralyzing and unsolvable.
A second danger to President Roosevelt’s valiant and
heroic experiments seems to arise from the mood to hunt down
rich men as if they were noxious beasts. It is a very
attractive sport, and once it gets started quite a lot of
people everywhere are found ready to join in the chase.…The
pursuit is long and exciting and everyone’s blood is roused by
its ardor. The question arises whether the general well-being
of the masses will be advanced by an excessive indulgence in
this amusement.
Apparently, not wanting to upset his great wartime ally and
personal friend, Churchill removed this profile of the American
president from his book, Great Contemporaries, which was
printed later in the 1930s. It was added to later editions of the
book, published after the war and after Roosevelt’s death.
Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt teamed up to
create the worst depression in American history. They did so by
stifling private enterprise and effectively killing the only kind
of investment — private sector investment — that leads to
growth and prosperity.
Let’s hope we’re not about to replay this same old song —
which is ironically known by the title Happy Days Are Here
Again.
