FEAR ITSELF

On March 4, 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered the following speech at his election. The following line is worth remembering:

This great nation will endure, as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

This is important for two reasons. One is that it is true fear itself should be feared. Today we are a nation where major decisions are driven primarily by fear. In an attempt to avoid the COVID 19 epidemic, action was taken that destroyed our economy. Millions of people have lost jobs and our major cities look like ghost towns. We can no longer afford to make decisions based solely on fear.

But there is an even more important lesson to be learned from FDR’s famous speech. There was something to fear more than fear itself. It was people like FDR who thought the government was the solution to all problems. There had been depressions before, but they didn’t last very long and the economy always rebounded. 1929 wasn’t really that unique. What was unique was the massive growth of the government in a failed attempt to fix this. The New Deal did not result in economic recovery. The average unemployment rate from 1933 to 1941 was 18%. U.S. industrial production fell by nearly one-third. After 8 years, unemployment was still at around 14%. The best argument for the New Deal is that things could have been even worse. Few would argue that this was remotely successful. It is quite possible that doing nothing would have yielded better results.

My parents lived through the great depression and talked about it a lot. I vividly remember my dad saying that FDR did not end the depression, it was World War II. I later learned that he was probably right about that. The following article by Stephen Moore with Heritage.org should be mandatory reading today:

https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/commentary/the-enduring-myth-fdr-and-the-new-deal\

FDR raised the minimum wave. Sound familiar? He raised taxes on the rich. Sound familiar? He put the government in charge of creating jobs. Sound familiar? The budget skyrocketed. Sound familiar? Taxes reached an incredible 80% to soak the rich. Sound familiar?

All of this was tried. None of it worked. Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. No honest appraisal of the great depression reports anything but an increase in desperation and despair. No matter how well intended, there is little evidence the New Deal did much to truly help the poor and the unemployed.

You can see this from your window. Whether well intentioned or not, governors are resisting opening up the country. Many are promising a new normal. One where the government micromanages everything to “save us” from COVID 19. The Mayor of Los Angeles is talking seriously about banning meetings of more than 1,000 people until at least next spring. They are all dragging their feet. Trying to micromanage reopening the country. Governor Cuomo just extended the lock down until May 15th. They clearly intend to micromanage reopening our economy. What we really need is to be saved from them.

A pastor who dared hold a church service during the crisis died of COVID 19. Don Lemon mocked him while arrogantly explaining that God can’t stop a virus. Well neither can terrible reporting, because Chris Cuomo, Brook Baldwin and George Stephanopolous have all tested positive and sadly Maria Mercader from CBS died from COVID 19. I doubt that any of them got it from going to church.

There is no option to live in a risk free world. We all face risk of disease. Last year 42.9 million people caught the flu and 61,200 died. The year before there were 79,400 deaths. The CDC reported 23,000 deaths from flu as of March 14. That begs the question. Why is the number of flu deaths so low? It seems possible, perhaps likely, that a lot of flu deaths are being reported as COVID 19 deaths.

Remember, when Trump declared a national emergency he was being told we could have 2.6 million deaths. That is absurd when one considers that there are reportedly less than 150,000 deaths worldwide because of COVID 19. We still have people holding power over us pretending they prevented millions of deaths.

We already live in a new and horrible world. One where the government has unprecedented control over your life. A situation few of you could have imagined as recently as February of this year. You are told where you can shop and what you can buy. You are told when and where you can travel. There are strict restrictions of where and when you can gather together. In some states, you are forbidden to travel to a home you own.

Millions of people are out of work because the government ordered them to shut down and go home. Now they are waiting for the government to give them permission to reopen. They will be told when to open, how many hours to operate, what they can sell and how many customers they can handle. In the meantime the economy is fueled solely by government checks, slow to arrive and unlikely to be adequate. We are once again engaged in a great civil war testing whether a return to a free society is even possible. The real enemy is not COVID 19. It is those who want to use this crisis to remake our society.

TDM