Why Can’t Liberals Do What Needs to be Done?

Back in 1932, when FDR began planning what would become known as the New Deal, he faced two very daunting problems.

The first problem was that the United States was mired in the deepest, economic calamity of the country’s entire history, part of a worldwide economic downturn which no government had been able to solve.

The second problem was that FDR had absolutely no idea how dreadful things really were and therefore no ability to determine the effectiveness of any governmental response to clean up the mess.

We had no unemployment compensation, so we didn’t really know how many people were out of work. We didn’t know how many banks were closed down or were still operating because although there was a Federal Reserve, most states still chartered their own banks. We didn’t know how many Americans were too poor to purchase the basic necessities of everyday life because what we now call ‘ADC-welfare’ didn’t exist. We didn’t even know what really brought about the stock market collapse because there was no governmental regulation of the securities market, which is now done by the SEC.

All of these regulatory and financial assistance initiatives either came into existence or substantially increased their authority during FDR’s first term, and for those of us born after the Great Depression, the…