New Deal

Politically-motived objections to President Roosevelt's "New Deal" would long outlive FDR himself. In 2003, when Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman was looking for a term to describe the ideologically-driven motivations of President George W. Bush and his administration, the phrase he selected was "the great unraveling" -- Krugman's image saw Roosevelt's New Deal programs (above all Social Security) as having become the very fabric of the society in which we live, and the simpleminded libertarianism of the GOP attitude toward the social programs of the New Deal was a mistaken . Yet I think it would be easiest to answer the question of whether Republicans' libertarian objections to the New Deal are genuinely based on the New Deal's curtailment of actual liberty. I hope an examination of campaign speeches by both FDR and Roosevelt from the 1932 Presidential election will elucidate the relationship between individual freedom and the...
[ View Full Essay]