The industry created by the war effort elevated the US economy from the Great Depression.

http://tinyurl.com/44ysum

Lend-Lease got the engine started but things remained bleak during the war. Paper says depression lasted more than 15 years and anti-competitive regulation prolonged it 7 years.

Someone try to find the repealed/rolled back regulation of Financial Markets leading to the bailout. More lies.

It appears that the only kind of liberty and rights you care about involve gay marriage.

Some people care about the rights of a child to life. Some care about the rights of an individual in his property or its use. Some people care about the choices parents have in educating their children. Some people care about the millions of Third World poor who die because they have no right to spray for malaria control. Some people object to the persecution of the Boy Scouts. Some people worry about those on the bottom of the economic ladder who are cut off when the minimum wage is raised and they can’t find a first job. Some people are concerned that colleges all across the country have stifling “speech codes” which enforce rigid ideological adherence. All of these people find a home in the Republican Party. Because the enemy of all the rights involved in those concerns reside in the Democratic Party.

And whoever it was above who said that America’s greatest prosperity came under FDR’s very rigid state control desperately needs a history lesson. FDR extended the depression for many years with his policies.

I hate to break it to ya, but it’s worse even than that. Life during WWII was as sparse as during the depression. Unemployment was taken care of, but since the GNP was being poured into the military, actual standard of living was terrible. In the ’30s you couldn’t afford it. During WWII, you couldn’t find it. And if you could it was either rationed or illegal.

Morale, however was great! It’s one thing to be deprived. It’s quite another to sacrifice heroically for the genuine good of all (but consume as few calories as when “deprived”). A depression is so, well, depressing. But a World War it to die for.

And, of course, when the war ended, there was a terrific recession and we were dropped back to 1940 standard of living anyway. It wasn’t until after 1947 that we started genuinely to recover from the great depression. The GI Bill was a big leg up, which goes to show that not ALL big gummint is necessarily a Bad thing. If Ike had gotten the taxes down below a 90% marginal rate, he might have been as successful as Kennedy or Reagan. Alas . . .

There is a reason that the adversarial system dominates democracy and that is because while both sides are sometimes right – they are also often very wrong and when that happens we hope that the other side acts as a check and balance to such flawed ideology.

With the current legislative domination, I sit in gloomy despondency earnestly hoping “we the people” will, without delay, be capable of “checking and balancing” the “flawed ideology” of income redistribution and cap and trade.

Pamela, even agricultural producers will be subject to fees.

To wit: http://www.nacdnet.org

NACD’s policy on climate change, adopted at the July 2008 Board Meeting, is fully consistent with the statement adopted at the consultation. Conservation districts could potentially be involved in a “carbon credit” system in a variety of ways. One aspect could be to act as an “aggregator,” where credits from individual farmers are collected and brokered. Aggregators typically receive a fee or commission for their work. Another opportunity is for districts would be [sic] to act as “verifiers,” to verify that the proper conservation practices were applied.

“Verify” should be a very scary word to a government employee. Will I be required to join the civilian army and carry a weapon to improve verification.

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=940841

Maybe an argument for the use of strategic nuclear devices?

Yes, I’ve found this spot to occasionally roost. It’s nice to hear from another of the “old crowd.” Keep fighting the good fight. :)

i hate to tell you this but the prosperity that came after FDR was due mostly to world war 2 not government imposed regulations

On Jan. 24 2003 the Israelis reported that Russian engineers were transporting chemical weapons to Syria. Within a year Jordan arrested in or near Amman idigenous terrorists with 20 tons of chemical weaponry.

Early on following Iraqi surrender, 500 55gal. drums of cyclosarin were found buried near an military airbase. This was labeled insecticide by the ‘media’.

To date the left still disparages the plastic turkey Bush was photographed with at Thanksgiving in Iraq.

Our problem is on the left, with its truculent media and government apparatchiks. Lie long enough and loud enough and eventually the fools either believe you or back down.

The World bank and the IMF tried to enforce the Washington consensus in country after country and they finally had to admit that it failed miserably in every one, especially their flagship country of Argentina. They even admitted in official reports that the latin economies had been growing a lot faster before the World bank’s free-market meddling. Their method of imposing free-markets was ironically a statist set of rules that governments had to comply with to the letter otherwise they’d lose cash. Of course by it’s very inflexibility it failed in exactly the same way as Stalin’s five year plans failed; by ignoring human nature and ignoring critical feedback. When things go wrong all the idealogues just keep chanting “it’s because the medicine isn’t strong enough” or “they’re not doing what we tell them”. This trust-the-theory and damn-the-data approach is of course exactly what Milton Friedman had preached.

The sad truth is that when you have a system of no controls then criminals both from the bottom-up, ie mafias, and top-down, ie monopolistic Enron-types, tend to take control. So capitalism, like it or not, needs to be regulated. And the USA and Europe merely imposes an ideological non-statist system on other nations via the World bank and the IMF despite not having ever tried it themselves.

Indeed America didn’t become dominant through a lack of regulation. That’s a huge myth. America has always been highly regulated. California and New York are indeed the most highly regulated and yet are usually the most successful. It’s greatest prosperity even actually came about under very rigid state control by FDR. And this was shortly after a relaxation of the regulation of credit had caused the depression. It’s not that simple of course but then nothing is ever as simple as people would like to believe. Mostly we only know what works by seeing what worked and it’s very often not what the theory predicted. While things are going well the incumbent party says “it’s due to our policies” while the opposition says “it’s due to the legacy we left you”. And then when things turn sour the incumbent says “it wasn’t us, it was the previous administration’s stupid policies” while the opposition says “you ruined our legacy”.

On your other idea that all good things have come from innovative right-wing ideology – well I’m afraid not. Most innovation springs from state-funded, left-wing dominated academia. It is fair to state that right-wing dominated businessmen then see those ideas and fund them but the academics have to bring the ideas to the attention of the businessmen in the first place. Hence, whether you like it or not, we all need each other.

There is a reason that the adversarial system dominates democracy and that is because while both sides are sometimes right – they are also often very wrong and when that happens we hope that the other side acts as a check and balance to such flawed ideology. The idea of preventing domination by ideologues was in fact the intention of the founding fathers of USA when they set up the separation-of-power system. It might be annoying to some but they were right.

With the collapse of the Whig party, they all became Republicans. Lincoln destroyed the Compact between the States, created ‘Executive Orders’ and in an attempt to save the Union, let what it stood for die on the battlefield. Federalism, as we know it, can be said to have been born under Lincoln.

Granted, the compact was deeply flawed from Day One and the Founder’s knew it at the time, but as the Articles of the Confederation weren’t working, accepting the Compromise on Slavery was at the time the only way to save these States united.

Every 70 or so years, the POTUS dramatically alters the nature of the compact. Lincoln in 1860s was the first. FDR in 1930s was the second and in 2000s, will history blame the great change on Bush or Obama? A few years ago, I first thought it might be Bush with the PATRIOT act, but I am not so sure anymore.

We live in interesting times, yes indeed.

What just happened here. I go to sleep in England and I wake up to find everyone spilling out their deepest political thoughts. There are too many skeletons rattling here and I suggest they are thrust back into their cupboards forthwith, the doors locked shut and the keys swallowed.

Good grief, you are all chattering like teenagers who think it’s cool to expose their unwashed, fake Calvin Klein skeggies whilst walking about, looking as if “dire rear” is the latest fragrance. Have you chaps no shame?

As for that naughty Pamela! Oh la la!

We need Smilies, so that my humour is not misjudged as a caustic diatribe.

Perry