How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World ep. 8–Infiltrating the West pt. 2

Ep.8 Chapter Five: Infiltrating the West (Part I) - 2 Table of Contents 3. From the New Deal to Progressivism 4. The Cultural Revolution of the West 5. The Antiwar and Civil Rights Movements 3. From the New Deal to Progressivism On Thursday, October 24, 1929, the New York stock market crashed. The crisis spread from the financial sector to the entire economy, sparing none of the major developed nations of the West. Unemployment spiked to over a quarter of the population, and the total number of unemployed exceeded 30 million. Apart from the Soviet Union, industrial production in major industrial countries dropped by an average of 27 percent. In early 1933, within 100 days of Roosevelt’s inauguration, many bills were introduced around the theme of solving the crisis. The policies increased government intervention in the economy and passed major reforms: Congress enacted the Emergency Banking Act, Agricultural Adjustment Act, National Industrial Recovery Act, and Social Security Act. Though Roosevelt’s New Deal essentially ended by the outbreak of World War II, many of the institutions and organizations that emerged during the period have continued to shape American society to the present day. Roosevelt issued more executive orders than the total number of such decrees hitherto issued by all presidents in the 20th century. Nevertheless, the American unemployment rate in the United States did not fall below double digits until the war. The New Deal’s real effect was to set the U.S. government on a trajectory of high taxation, big government, and economic interventionism. In his 2017 book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, conservative thinker Dinesh D’Souza argued that the National Recovery Act, which formed the centerpiece of Roosevelt’s New Deal, essentially meant the end of the U.S. free market. According to FDR’s Folly, a 2003 book by historian Jim Powell, the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression rather than ending it: the Social Security Act and labor laws encouraged further unemployment, while high taxes encumbered healthy business, and the like. Economist and Nobel Prize Laureate Milton Friedman praised Powell’s work, saying: “As Powell demonstrates without a shadow of a doubt, the New Deal hampered recovery from the contraction, prolonged and added to unemployment, and set the stage for ever more intrusive and costly government.”