Tell me if you spot one of these "free societies." America hasn't been one for about 150 years, and the decay has been getting worse for the last 60 or so.
Wrong idea, right time. The Civil War (and the resulting amendments):
My point was that the United States was obviously not a free society prior to the civil war, at least by most reasonable definitions of the term. Similarly, claiming the US has become simply "less free" in the past 60 years is laughable. Women and minorities have seen huge strides in the path toward establishing their personal freedoms. To just pick one arbitrary example, it wasn't until 1966 that beating became grounds for divorce in New York - and women still had to prove that a "sufficient" number of beatings had taken place.
I strongly believe in a free society, but let's not pretend that the United States used to be some kind of paradise and only the federal government is to blame for our problems - that's pure ideology.
Tell me if you spot one of these "free societies."
America hasn't been one for about 150 years, and the decay has been getting worse for the last 60 or so.
Since we abolished slavery? Wha-huh?
By that measure FDR would qualify as "evil" - his policies (including the US' insistence on the gold standard long after other nations abandoned it) extended the Depression for the US for at least 6 years and caused suffering to millions of people.
I agree with your sentiment, but I have to say that your "facts" about FDR are a little off. First, most people say that FDR took the US off the gold standard.
Second, the claim that he "extended the Depression" is based, from what I can tell, entirely on work by Cole and Ohanian that is not exactly universally accepted by economists. It assumes that neoclassical growth theory is correct and then tries to explain why it fails to account for the slow recovery from the Great Depression.
They only 'prove' that FDR's policies were at fault if you assume that their theory correctly accounts for the growth that didn't actually occur. Yes, sounds pretty convoluted - that's the great part about the social sciences. You can make claims about causes based on data that doesn't exist.
We have a equal opportunity Calculus class -- it's fully integrated.