FDR Repudiated the Welfare State: ‘a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit’

I had no idea that FDR had ever said anything like this.  He sounds like Mark Steyn himself, who first persuaded me that forced redistribution is not only bad for the “makers”, but also for the “takers”—that is, the welfare state is not only bad economics, but more importantly, it also tends to infantilize its recipients; it is corrosive of the very human spirit.

Don’t take my word for it; read FDR’s words for yourself.  Here they are, in context:

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Abolish the IRS

As Mark Levin and others have observed, the recent IRS abuses are not unique to the Obama administration.  (See 5/20/13 broadcast, elsewhere.)  As L. Gordon Crovitz says,

There is a long history of presidents using the IRS against political enemies. FDR went after newspapers that opposed the New Deal. JFK had his Ideological Organizations Audit Project target conservative groups like the American Enterprise Institute. Richard Nixon used the IRS to harass people on his enemies list.

Jon Stewart: IRS Abuses Almost Imply that Government Is Incompetent at Doing Good but Pretty Good at Doing Evil

Via Eternity Matters: Even liberal Jon Stewart finds it troubling that the federal government targeted Tea Party groups because of their political views (warning: language):

All the Numbers You Always Wanted on Government Spending (But Were Afraid to Ask)

(Come for the pretty graphs; stay for the mounting sense of terror!)

I thought it would be useful to have all these data together in one place for easy reference, illustrated with easy-to-understand graphs, with links to solid sources.  I’ve even added a convenient hyperlinked table of contents:

• Government Keeps Growing

• Forced Redistribution Is Now the Main Thing the Federal Government Does

• “Fair Share”

• Federal Government Borrows More than a Third of Every Dollar It Spends

• “But I Heard Obama Has Been Really Responsible!”

‘Want lower unemployment? Get a GOP Governor.’

I certainly don’t want to lean too heavily on this—confounding variables and all that—but I know that at least one reader of this blog finds this kind of evidence very persuasive.  (I’m sure he’ll convert to conservatism immediately upon seeing this…)

Via Haemet and Breitbart.com, Examiner.com reports that Republican governors are correlated with falling unemployment rates recently.  (Eternity Matters also mentioned this, whence the pithy title.)

According to Examiner.com, 17 new Republican governors (elected in the 2010 Tea Party tsunami) first took office in January 2011; 8 new Democrat governors were also elected and took office at the same time.

Julia

Everyone is talking about this “slideshow” put out by Barackobama.com last week.  It depicts the life of Julia (“who has no face”), a hypothetical woman who is dependent on the government at every stage of life, thanks to the policies of President Obama.  Except that’s presented as a good thing.  The slideshow is a cornucopia of half-truths, question begging, and born-yesterday utopianism.

As an antidote, the Heritage Foundation offers an alternative slideshow explaining why conservative reforms would be better, and exposing the hollowness of some of Barackobama’s arguments.  It doesn’t address everything, either—and I’d prefer much less government than either of them considers an option right now—but it’s an improvement.

Save Scott Walker

In 2011, Wisconsin and Ohio both passed laws repealing, to a significant extent, the mistake of public-sector unions.  (Public-sector unions are a relatively recent innovation; they necessarily create conflicts of interest and represent a structural problem for democracy.)  The Ohio reform was then itself repealed by ballot initiative, in a campaign funded largely by out-of-state union money.