Stop Repeating Yourself
July 22nd, 2011 - 9:59 am
Jonathan Alter, student of history:
Where’s Franklin Roosevelt when we need him? While campaigning amid 25 percent unemployment in 1932, Roosevelt argued for what he called “bold, persistent experimentation.”
As he put it: “It is common sense to take one method and try it. If it fails, admit failure frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
This spirit of creativity and experimentation is missing in today’s Washington, especially on jobs creation.
Persistant bold experimentation — stimulus, string-pushing, ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank — is precisely why we have a jobs problem, and precisely why unemployment never dropped below double digits until WWII came along.
How’s this for an experiment for Congress and the President:
Don’t do something, just sit there!
Better yet, stop doing what you have been doing. It was letting the Cult of Doing Something hold the checkbook that got us in this mess in the first place.
I’m missing the part where they admit failure. It’s actually, ‘Try something, when it fails, blame someone else and do it again harder.’
That seems to be the whole philosophy. It’s okay if you fail, as long as you tried your best. That’s fine… in a fantasy land where there are no other consequences. In the real world, you have finite resources, which include time. Every failure decreases your available resources (unless you have the option to obtain new resources by raising taxes). The original stimulus was passed knowing it would take 2 years to have any effect (and if they didn’t understand it would take that long, they are incompetent), so why can’t we spend 4-6 months experimenting with the strategy of “let people help themselves.”
There’s nothing wrong with this country a big meteorite hitting Washington DC wouldn’t fix.
By 1938 FDR and the electorate gave up on the nonsence. I suggest Mr. Alter read the ‘Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression’, by Amity Shlaes
Or ‘Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 1932-1940′, by William E. Leuchtenburg published in the early 1960′s.