Used to be that progressivism was the only dogma people heard in school.
Not anymore.
How things have changed!
I recently spent time with several hundred college-aged people at a Students for Liberty conference in Washington, D.C. Here were hundreds of students who actually understand that government creates many of the problems, and freedom -- personal and economic liberty -- makes things better.
Government has been trying to solve all our ills since FDR.
Look at where we are at now, in so many areas, and the more we spend, the worse it seems to get.
Even before FDR. The previous Roosevelt was very progressive:
Teddy Roosevelt was widely popular due to his status as a hero of the Spanish-American War and his belief in “speaking softly and carrying a big stick.” Taking over the presidency in 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley, he quickly assured America that he would not take any drastic measures. He then demanded a “Square Deal” that would address his primary concerns for the era—the three C’s: control of corporations, consumer protection, and conservation.
The ownership of corporations and the relationship between owners and laborers, as well as government’s role in the relationship, were the contentious topics of the period. Workers were demanding greater rights and protection, while corporations expected labor to remain cheap and plentiful. This conflict came to a head in 1902, with the anthracite coal strike in Pennsylvania. Coal mining was dirty and dangerous work, and 140,000 miners went on strike and demanded a 20 percent pay increase and a reduction in the workday from ten to nine hours. The mine owners were unsympathetic and refused to negotiate with labor representatives. With the approach of winter the dwindling coal supply began to cause concern throughout the nation.
Roosevelt, going against established precedent, decided to step in. He summoned the mine owners and union representatives to meet with him in Washington. Roosevelt was partly moved by strong public support and took the side of the miners. Still, the mine owners were reluctant to negotiate until Roosevelt, threatening to use his “big stick,” declared that he would seize the mines and operate them with federal troops. Owners reluctantly agreed to arbitration, where the striking workers received a 10 percent pay increase and a nine-hour working day. This was the first time a president sided with unions in a labor dispute, and it helped cement Roosevelt’s reputation as a friend of the common people and gave his administration the nickname “The Square Deal.”
Emboldened by this success and in pursuit of the first element of his Square Deal, Roosevelt began to attack large, monopolistic corporations. Some trusts were effective and legitimate, but many of these companies engaged in corrupt and preferential business practices. In 1902, the Northern Securities Company, owned by J.P. Morgan and James J. Hill, controlled most of the railroads in the northwestern United States and intended to create a total monopoly. Roosevelt initiated legal proceedings against Northern Securities and eventually the Supreme Court ordered that the company be dissolved. Roosevelt’s radical actions angered big business and earned him the reputation of a “trust buster,” despite the fact that his successors Taft and Wilson actually dissolved more trusts.
In 1903, with urging from Roosevelt, Congress created the Department of Commerce and Labor (DOCL). This cabinet-level department was designed to monitor corporations and ensure that they engaged in fair business practices. The Bureau of Corporations was created under the DOCL to benefit consumers by monitoring interstate commerce, helping dissolve monopolies, and promoting fair competition between companies. In 1913, the DOCL was split into two separate entities, the Department of Commerce and the Department of Labor, both of which continue to play an important role in regulating business today.
Hoover approved federal financing of large work projects, such as the massive Boulder, Hoover, and Grand Coulee Dams to the tune of $2.5 billion. These projects could be justified both as providing jobs and as creating structures of great value to the nation.
In 1932, the Hoover administration set up the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) to make a half billion dollars in "pump-priming" loans to stimulate the economy in a "trickle-down" manner. Most of the benefit went to large corporations with little "trickling down" to small businesses or individuals. Even so, government projects and the RFC represented a substantial departure from the conservative position of no assistance, and they became the prototype to the New Deal programs of Franklin Roosevelt. Hoover slowly shed much of his resistance to federal policies aimed at helping individuals, but government was new to this kind of intervention. Not surprisingly, some of his programs were ineffective while some were actually counterproductive.
Hoover called a special session of Congress in 1930 to try to give farmers tariff relief, but the legislature allowed special interest groups to twist the original bill into a monster that raised tariffs to 60 percent instead of lowering them from the former 38 percent. Foreign countries that could no longer compete in American markets reacted by raising tariffs on American goods. The resulting economic isolation further stifled business that was already limping into the Depression.
In Hoover's own words, during the 1932 presidential campaign:
Creating new jobs and giving to the whole system a new breath of life; nothing has ever been devised in our history which has done more for ... "the common run of men and women." Some of the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation to take its course until we had found bottom.... We determined that we would not follow the advice of the bitter-end liquidationists and see the whole body of debtors of the United States brought to bankruptcy and the savings of our people brought to destruction.
And so, President Herbert Hoover, on the eve of the Great Depression, stood ready to meet any storm warnings on the business horizon.[44] Hoover, the "great engineer," stood now armed on many fronts with the mighty weapons and blueprints of a "new economic science." Unfettered by outworn laissez-faire creeds, he would use his "scientific" weapons boldly, if need be, to bring the business cycle under governmental control.
Hoover did not fail to employ promptly and vigorously his "modern" political principles, or the new "tools" provided him by "modern" economists. And, as a direct consequence, America was brought to her knees as never before. Yet, by an ironic twist of fate, the shambles that Hoover abandoned when he left office was attributed, by Democratic critics, to his devotion to the outworn tenets of laissez-faire.
your mind is quite pliable, eh Wanna?
Under Hoover's laissez faire policies, stock market collapsed, creating worst depression U.S ever faced. Massive bank failures ( this was before creation of FDR's FDIC, spunky" ) wiped out millions of people's savings. Highly restrictive Hawley-Smoot tariff,enacted during Hoover's watch, dried up international trade greatly deepening depression. When Hoover left office in 3/33 ,unemployment rate was 25%.
FDR's "new deal" policies were quite flawed at times, but at least it was an attempt to do SOMETHING. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, unemployment rate fell to 10%, so FDR'S policies must have had SOME effect.
"Cultist" you are SO profoundly uneducated.
-- Modified on 4/2/2011 7:02:09 AM
ROFL!!!!
Did you read ANYTHING AT ALL that I posted?
Hoover was NOT LAISSEZ-FAIRE! I blame him for the Great Depression, but NO WAY because he was laissez-faire. He was VERY interventionist.
The Hoover laissez-faire myth is the kool-aid.
But you know what? Specters are ghosts. And ghosts aren’t real.
The Herbert Hoover of popular imagination was a laissez-faire lickspittle of Adam Smith. But this idea began as Rooseveltian propaganda and endures as the creation myth of modern liberalism.
William Leuchtenburg, possibly the greatest authority on the FDR era, wrote some time ago, “Almost every historian now recognizes that the image of Hoover as a ‘do-nothing’ president is inaccurate.”
After the stock market crash of 1929, Hoover browbeat business leaders to keep wages and prices high. He invested heavily in public works projects. He pushed for an international moratorium on debts. He created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which later became a home for many of FDR’s Brain Trusters. Hoover increased farm subsidies enormously.
Some of Hoover’s interventions were good but ineffectual. A few were very, very bad and very effective.
In 1932, Hoover in effect repealed Calvin Coolidge’s tax cuts, increasing the rates for the poorest taxpayers by more than 100 percent and hiking the top rate from 25 percent to 63 percent. Worse, contrary to his own better instincts, Hoover signed the disastrous Smoot-Hawley trade bill that raised protectionist walls at precisely the moment the world needed trade the most.
And then there is
http://theinternetguy.wordpress.com/2008/12/15/herbert-hoover-and-the-myth-of-laissez-faire/
The major theme of this paper is that this conventional historical view is pure mythology and that the facts are virtually the reverse: that Herbert Hoover, far from being an advocate of laissez-faire, was in every way the precursor of Roosevelt and the New Deal, that, in short, he was one of the major leaders of the twentieth-century shift from relatively laissez-faire capitalism to the modern corporate state. In the terminology of William A. Williams and the New Left, Hoover was a preeminent “corporate liberal.”
When Herbert Hoover returned to the United States in late 1919, fresh from his post as Relief Administrator in Europe, he came armed with a suggested “Reconstruction Program” for America. The program sketched the outlines of a corporate state; there was to be national planning through “voluntary” cooperation among businesses and groups under “central direction.”(1) The Federal Reserve System was to allocate capital to essential industries and thereby eliminate the industrial “waste” of free markets. Hoover’s plan also included the creation of public dams, the improvement of waterways, a federal home-loan banking system, the promotion of unions and collective bargaining, and governmental regulation of the stock market to eliminate “vicious speculation.”
Hoover was only thwarted from breaking the firm American tradition of laissez-faire during a depression by the fact that the severe but short-lived depression of 1920-21 was over soon after he took office. He also faced some reluctance on the part of Harding and the Cabinet. As it was, however, Hoover organized a federal committee on unemployment, which supplied unemployment relief through branches and subbranches to every state, and in numerous cities and local communities. Furthermore, Hoover organized the various federal, state, and municipal governments to increase public works, and persuaded the biggest business firms, such as Standard Oil of New Jersey and United States Steel, to increase their expenditure on repairs and construction. He also persuaded employers to spread unemployment by cutting hours for all workers instead of discharging the marginal workers – an action he was to repeat in the 1929 Depression.(4)
-- Modified on 4/2/2011 9:35:38 AM
"Priapus: Are you simply trying to make progressives look stupid?"
Looking through his one way mirror, Priapus doesn't notice, he's the class idiot.
nationwide bank failures & 25% unemployment on his watch. The minimal amount of pitiful & ineffective programs Hoover implented did very little to alleviate the great depression. But, then again, for a "Rand" cultist who think the 1890's were halycon days for U.S. standard of living, I guess
Hoover WOULD look like an "interventionst".
Lastly, Quad, before you call someone a "class idiot", get your GED.
Quad, one last q : are you still being "moderated" ?------------
Again, only in comparison. Yes, FDR expanded Hoover's interventions. But to claim that Hoover was laissez-faire is absolute nonsense. Compared to every president before him, Hoover implemented MASSIVE, unprecedented intervention.
Compared to the Atlantic Ocean, Lake Superior is just a puddle. But you can drown in either one just as easily. You might as well be calling Lake Superior dry land as call Hoover a laissea-faire president.
"These findings suggest that the recession was three times worse — at a minimum — than it would otherwise have been, because of Hoover,"-- L E Ohanian, UCLA
"These findings suggest that the recession was three times worse — at a minimum — than it would otherwise have been, because of Hoover," said Lee E. Ohanian, a UCLA professor of economics.
The policies, which included both propping up wages and encouraging job-sharing, also accounted for more than two-thirds of the precipitous decline in hours worked in the manufacturing sector, which was much harder hit initially than the agricultural sector, according to Ohanian.
"By keeping industrial wages too high, Hoover sharply depressed employment beyond where it otherwise would have been, and that act drove down the overall gross national product," Ohanian said. "His policy was the single most important event in precipitating the Great Depression."
The difference is, over time, students accept the politics their teachers teach, less and less. They have gotten smarter despite teacher bias. Its not from the lack of teachers trying, its just more comedic when they do.
I think its the Internet. Students can uncover their teachers' lies with a simple Google search.
Look at some of the crap people post here, for example. You can find anything on the Internet to support any position at all. And most of it is bullshit. You have to have enough intelligence to sort out the chicken shit from the chicken salad, just like anywhere else. Saying it must be true 'cause I found it on Google is like saying "it must be true 'cause I saw it in the Natoinal Enquirer."
PS: Hint. Before forwarding anything you find (and especially if you agree with it) check it out on Snopes. Snopes is your friend.
But the internet is also an excellent source of good information. Your own example of Snopes.com is evidence that reliable information is available on the web.
My "discussion" with Priapus about Hoover and laissez-faire has more examples of what I am talking about.
One of my links was to CBS, and cited a respected historian specializing in the FDR era.
The contention was the Hoover's laissez-faire policies caused the great Depression. All that is needed to debunk this is evidence of Hoover's intervention in the economy. For that, you can refer to all sorts of things Hoover did. There is those meeting with business leaders where he pressured them into changing their business decisions through threats of labor legislation.
A good source on that is UCLA professor L E Ohanian:
For instance, can you name the structure in the following picture, and explain its relationship to the idea that Hoover was a laissez-faire president?
Since Wrestlemania is today, and since you bring up John Stossel, I'm reminded of what a wrassler taught Stossel one day...that social Darwinism doesn't always work out well for cultists. 
Did Stossel ever argue for social Darwinism?
Nice way to evade actual argument. John Stossel got beaten up once by a pro wrestler, so obviously his views on economics are wrong.
ROFL!
-- Modified on 4/2/2011 9:29:34 AM
The teacher dogma is still strong in areas without much school choice. They only get away with that where options are still limited, like they were everywhere in previous decades.
Not anymore.
How things have changed!
I recently spent time with several hundred college-aged people at a Students for Liberty conference in Washington, D.C. Here were hundreds of students who actually understand that government creates many of the problems, and freedom -- personal and economic liberty -- makes things better.