News the Stars Bring Today

Hat Tip Duke University Professor William Graham Sumner (1840-1910)
When FDR was campaigning in 1932, he delivered a radio address, which has become known as the “Forgotten Man.” In the radio address, he called for a plan to recover the nation’s economy like the one that had been used in WWI, “that builds from the bottom up and not from the top down, that puts (its’) faith once more in the “forgotten man” at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” The radio address was put together by Raymond Moley, professor at Columbia University, part of FDR’s “brain trust”.

FDR criticized “the habit of the unthinking to turn in times like this to the illusions of economic magic. People suggest that a huge expenditure of public funds by the Federal Government and by State and local governments will completely solve the unemployment problem. But it is clear that even if we could raise many billions of dollars and find definitely useful public works to spend these billions on, even all that money would not give employment to the seven million or ten million people who are out of work. Let us admit frankly that it would be only a stopgap. A real economic cure must go to the killing of the bacteria in the system rather than to the treatment of external symptoms.” However, his administration did just the opposite.

He spoke about the plight of the farmer who could not afford to buy the commodities of the industrial sector. So, both sectors became crippled. He criticized the idea of helping Wall Street and the banks, while forgetting the small man, and the necessity of restoring his “purchasing power.”

However, the radio address differed very significantly from what Professor Sumner had originally written. Sumner was strongly opposed to socialism and capitalism, a strong advocate of laissez-faire, whereas FDR’s address “stirred up class prejudices in the volatile atmosphere of the Depression.” In fact, FDR’s opponent, Al Smith, called him a “demagogue.”

There is a vivid example of his Philosophy in an essay written by William Graham Sumner, (1840-1910) who was a Professor of Political Economy and of Sociology at Yale (the first professor of sociology in the US, according to The Future of Freedom Foundation)

This is an excerpt from the essay: “The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. The radical vice of all these schemes, from a sociological point of view, is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his position, character, and interests, as well as the ultimate effects on society through C’s interests, are entirely overlooked.”

“I call C the Forgotten Man…The friends of humanity start out with certain benevolent feelings toward “the poor,” “the weak,” “the laborers,” and others of whom they make pets. They generalize these classes, and render them impersonal, and so constitute the classes into social pets. They turn to other classes and appeal to sympathy and generosity, and to all the other noble sentiments of the human heart… Every bit of capital, therefore, which is given to a shiftless and inefficient member of society, who makes no return for it, is diverted from a reproductive use; but if it was put into reproductive use, it would have to be granted in wages to an efficient and productive laborer…the United States is the great country for the unskilled laborer…the working-man needs no improvement in his condition except to be freed from the parasites who are living on him.”

The description of “the Forgotten Man is, according to Professor Sumner in  Wikipedia: “He works, he votes, generally he prays–but he always pays. . . .”

According to Future of Freedom foundation “Franklin Roosevelt is responsible for creating the Leviathan State that confronts us today.” He was a true student of his cousin Teddy who used Julius Caesar’s technique of pandering to the lower class, even though he was from the upper class and the big government that he created did nothing to end the Depression. In fact, Canada had a Depression at the same time and it ended quickly in two years, instead of 10. More recently, of course, we have the example of the”lost decade of Japan.” However, Obama seems hell-bent on using his demagoguery to push big government, and some of the “Obama team” refer to the Economic Recovery as the “New, New Deal”.

Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993), probably the most influential economist of free-market trade said, according to Mises.org: “”Every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation,” Hazlitt emphasized. If the WPA builds a $10 million dollar bridge, for example, “the bridge has to be paid out of taxes… Therefore,” Hazlitt observed, “for every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else… All that has happened, at best, is that there has been a diversion of jobs because of the project.” (author of Economics in One Lesson) ” In 1959, Hazlitt came out with The Failure of the “New Economics,” an extraordinary line-by-line refutation of John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory.”