You might not expect today?s highest-profile advocates of limited government to agree with the man who gave us the New Deal. But Hillsdale College historian Paul Rahe makes the connection in a new Commentary article. (The subscriber link is here.)
Consider what Barack Obama and the Democrats did over the past two years?with their so-called stimulus, health-care reform, and reform of financial regulation. Each initiative involved the passage of a bill more than a thousand pages in length that virtually no one voting on could have read, and no one but those who framed it could have understood. Each involved a massive expansion of the federal government and massive payoffs to favored constituencies. And each was part of a much larger project openly pursued by self-styled progressives in the course of the last century and aimed at concentrating in the hands of ?a small group? of putative experts ?an almost complete control over other people?s property, other people?s money, other people?s labor?other people?s lives.? Without quite knowing whom they are evoking, Tea Partiers are inclined to say, as FDR said in 1936, that if they do not put a stop to what is going on, ?for too many of us life? will be ?no longer free? and ?liberty no longer real??for otherwise the bureaucratic busybodies ensconced in Washington will deprive us of the means by which to ?follow the pursuit of happiness? as we see fit.
The only difference is that FDR?s assertions demonizing the ?economic royalists? were demonstrably false, and when the Tea Partiers make comparable claims today, they are, alas, telling the truth.
As a corrective for any warm, fuzzy feelings you might be having now about FDR, consult Amity Shlaes? dissection of his New Deal policies in her excellent book The Forgotten Man.
