After The Revelry, Some Sobering Thoughts by Tim Siggia

After The Revelry, Some Sobering Thoughts

By Tim Siggia

January 03, 2009

"Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it." -- George Santayana

He wasn't even supposed to be elected, but he nevertheless was -- though some said he wasn't. During the first year of his presidency he acted boldly and decisively in a moment of national crisis. But he also made enemies at home, launching America into an unpopular war, and his successor would be elected in large part on a promise to end that war. He was detested by the news media, and by some in the military as well. His critics, of whom there were many, called him stupid, among other things, and he became an object of scorn and ridicule in popular culture. By the end of his presidency, public opinion had so turned against him that he was almost universally acknowledged to be one of the most unpopular presidents ever to hold the office.

His name was Harry Truman, and is today recognized by history as having been one of America's greatest presidents. Yet when his train arrived in Independence, Missouri, back in 1953 after the inauguration of the wildly popular Dwight D. Eisenhower, nobody met him at the station, and he and his wife Bess carried their own suitcases and walked home by themselves.

His story has some remarkable parallels to those of two other presidents, one who came before him, and one who came after. The first was Herbert Hoover, who was turned out of office in 1932 after the onset of the Great Depression, and even to this day continues to be blamed by some for that 12-year period of austerity in American history. His successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, is also credited with having ended that national nightmare. The truth is, however, that Roosevelt was no more the eradicator of the Great Depression than was Hoover its author.

The other, of course, is George W. Bush, who will leave office on Jan. 20 in the wake of a worldwide recession, and, according to a CNN poll of Dec. 26, with three out of four Americans being glad to see him go. Like Truman, and unlike his own predecessor, Bush acted decisively in response to Osama bin Laden's attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and went after Al Quaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Then, acting upon what were then considered to be credible intelligence reports of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, Bush convinced the Congress to declare war on Iraq -- a war which sent Hussein into hiding. Hussein was later tracked down and captured by American forces, then tried and executed by the new Iraqi government which Bush had helped to establish.

Prior to these events, Saddam Hussein had made a mockery of United Nations efforts to inspect his facilities, allowing inspectors to come in only after he obviously had sanitized the facilities to be inspected, which had been a condition of the UN allowing him to stay in power after the first Gulf War. But when Bush's successful invasion of Iraq turned up no WMD's as they would later be termed, the American news media, who had never liked Bush and had deliberately worked to undermine his presidency from the beginning, seized the opportunity to turn public opinion against him, as did the House and Senate Democrats, many of whom had voted to declare war on Iraq. When the results of the CNN poll were released, the staffers of most of America's major newspapers and broadcast news networks no doubt engaged in a collective high-five, and exulted triumphantly, "Mission Accomplished!"

Like Eisenhower before him, president-elect Barack Obama has promised to end the war in Iraq, which has grown dismally unpopular despite American successes there. And, like FDR before him, Obama now promises to end the current recession and turn our economy around. How will he do this? He will do it, of course, by ushering in a new era of big government, more federal regulations, and higher taxes -- those taxes, of course, to be levied only on the top five percent of American income earners: "the rich," who, of course, own more than their fair share of everything, and must therefore be forced to "spread the wealth around."

There is one annoying fact about Obama's prescription for recovery, however, that tends to be overlooked by those currently indulging in their collective Obama-mania: This prescription has been tried already, 76 years ago, to be precise. It didn't work then, and it isn't going to work now. Though popular folklore to this day credits Roosevelt and his New Deal programs with having ended the Great Depression, the truth tells a very different story. The dirty little secret that liberal historians don't want us to know about the National Recovery Act (NRA), the Works Projects Association (WPA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and Roosevelt's other New Deal programs of federal make-work projects, is that none of those projects actually worked. Rather than ending the Depression, they actually served to prolong it!

As Hoover did not himself cause the Depression, neither did Bush himself cause our current recession -- though in fairness it must be noted that he did contribute significantly to it. The business cycle, in fact, tends to be apolitical. It obeys its own rules, irrespective of who is in the White House or which political party is currently holding power. Economists of all political persuasions tend to agree that the business cycle is analogous to the oceanic tides: there are periodic ebbs and flows, and, no matter what any president can either do or promise, it can never be neap tide all the time. For every boom there must be a corresponding recession. The wiser among us understand this, and, rather than engage in orgiastic spending during times of plenty, they put something aside for the tough times they know will inevitably follow. When recessions come, they seem to last forever, yet this is for the most part an illusion of the times. As previously noted, the marketplace tends to obey its own rules, one of which is the Law of Supply and Demand. The marketplace therefore will eventually correct itself -- providing, of course, that government allows it to do so, and does not interfere.

The unusual length of the Great Depression had largely to do with government interference with the normal business cycle. Today, to a remarkable extent, we are repeating the experiences of our parents and grandparents. Had he been a true conservative rather than a "compassionate" one, President Bush would not have pushed for bailouts of the banking and automotive industries. Had the constitutional remedy for corporate failure, i.e., managed bankruptcy, been put into place, then Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, and the "Big Three" auto makers would have of course gone under -- as they should have! Then traditional American ingenuity would have of necessity gone to work to replace those failed enterprises with newer and better ones. Monetary intellectuals such as Ben Bernancke and Henry Paulson should certainly have been able to see this, yet it seems they too were blinded by political considerations. So it is that instead of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, we are instead using the taxpayers' money to subsidize failure -- and, in doing so, encouraging further failure.

Whether or not the Bush presidency is a failed one is now for history to decide. As Mark Antony said of his friend Julius Caesar, the evil Bush did will live after him, and the good may well be forever forgotten. Thanks to the Democrats and their allies in the news media, Americans today seem neither to know nor care that it was Bush whose policies rid the world of Saddam Hussein and kept subsequent 9/11 attacks from happening on American soil. They have seemingly forgotten about the relatively strong economy America had during six of the eight years that Bush was in office. All they seem to remember now is an unpopular war and a recession -- and these two things alone, it seems now, will constitute the Bush legacy.

In the meantime, however, it is high time that many of us get over Obama-Mania, and start seeing our president-elect in more realistic terms. He is a man, not a magician. He is not God come to earth. He is not going to magically end the recession, make us all prosperous, bring about world peace, and make the rest of the world love us. Neither is government going to accomplish all this for us. If it truly is to happen, it is we, the American people, the parents, grandparents, executives, laborers, educators, farmers, and yes, the retired as well, who must make it so. In the words of Ronald Reagan, government is not the answer to our problem, government is the problem -- and the sooner we all realize this, the sooner we will stop looking to self-styled Messiahs to make us successful, and look instead to our God who gives us our opportunities, and to ourselves to use that which God has given us.