Poetry 56 Happy Warrior

really the basis of the New Deal,” liberals and the media hooted; the Washington Post huffed that “several historians of the New Deal period questioned by the Washington Post said they had no idea what Reagan was referring to.” Thanks to Shlaes’s book, journalists in the future will not be able to plead such ignorance: She notes that FDR’s first attempt at centralized economic planning, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), owed its inspiration in part to Mussolini’s Italian model. The NRA’s ineffectuality could be demonstrated in a number of theoretical or technical ways, but Shlaes captures the futility of the enterprise in two magnificent sentences: “In a period of a year, 10,000 pages of law had been created [by the NRA], a figure that one had to compare with the mere 2,735 pages that constituted federal statute law. In twelve months, the NRA had generated more paper than the entire legislative output of the federal government since 1789.”

But when the Supreme Court saved FDR from this folly by ruling it unconstitutional, FDR veered farther left, with punitive tax measures that deterred capital formation and investment, and prosecutions of the rich (especially Samuel Insull and Andrew Mellon) that were purely political. The result of these and other ill-conceived measures was a needlessly prolonged Great Depression.

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

really the basis of the New Deal,” liberals and the media hooted; the Washington Post huffed that “several historians of the New Deal period questioned by the Washington Post said they had no idea what Reagan was referring to.” Thanks to Shlaes’s book, journalists in the future will not be able to plead such ignorance: She notes that FDR’s first attempt at centralized economic planning, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), owed its inspiration in part to Mussolini’s Italian model. The NRA’s ineffectuality could be demonstrated in a number of theoretical or technical ways, but Shlaes captures the futility of the enterprise in two magnificent sentences: “In a period of a year, 10,000 pages of law had been created [by the NRA], a figure that one had to compare with the mere 2,735 pages that constituted federal statute law. In twelve months, the NRA had generated more paper than the entire legislative output of the federal government since 1789.”

But when the Supreme Court saved FDR from this folly by ruling it unconstitutional, FDR veered farther left, with punitive tax measures that deterred capital formation and investment, and prosecutions of the rich (especially Samuel Insull and Andrew Mellon) that were purely political. The result of these and other ill-conceived measures was a needlessly prolonged Great Depression.