Why Can’t Liberals Explain Liberalism?

When FDR took over the Executive branch of the government in 1933, there were communities in the United States that were suffering from famine. This was a word which described conditions in countries like India or China, but never before in the United States.

So, the first thing Roosevelt did was to assemble a team of planners, and economists to come up with responses to the problem which would eventually become a series of governmental programs known as the New Deal, which included social security, welfare, unemployment compensation and regulation of banks and the stock market, both of which had completely collapsed in the previous few years.

But before FDR and his team could begin developing the government’s response to the wholesale breakdown of the national economy, they needed to know and measure the extent of the calamity. Except they immediately learned that the problem was that nobody knew how bad things had become.

Today we take for granted the monthly report on unemployment produced by the Department of Labor, the monthly inflation numbers from the Commerce Department, the weekly data on health put out by the CDC, and all the other information put out by the government on a regular basis.

But none of this information existed in 1933. How do you develop a plan to re-open banks when you don’t…