Mayoral Nostalgia for the New Deal

By  •  Tuesday March 9, 2010 5:13 AM PDT  •  3 Comments

In an article published in the Wall Street Journal on March 8, 2010, Louise Radnofsky reports that the U.S. Conference of Mayors claims it “can put thousands to work on infrastructure projects, as was done in the 1930s.”

The mayors expressed a collective willingness to hire people on jobs that benefit their communities—provided, of course, that the costs of such projects are financed principally by taxpayers residing (and voting) in jurisdictions beyond city limits.

Mayor Robert Duffy of Rochester, NY, for example, opines that he will ba able to hire large numbers of his constituents to, in Ms. Radnofsky’s words, “repair roads, clean up graffiti and enhance sewers” – “much like”, according to Mr. Duffy, “the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps] programs”. Other mayors justified their requests for more federal “stimulus” monies by drawing analogies to the New Deal’s Works Program Administration (WPA), which indeed employed hundreds of thousands of people forced out of work by the Great Depression.

Attentive students of the 1930s know better than to expect taxpayer-financed jobs to be anything more than a palliative for today’s “Great Recession”, which currently has stranded about 14 million Americans on the unemployment rolls.

First, contra Mayor Duffy, the CCC was a program that moved unemployed young men (but not women) from inner cities into camps located in the fresh-air environments of the Southeast and the Far West to blaze trails and plant trees on federally owned land. Among other things, the CCC’s built the Appalachian Trail, but it did not clean up graffiti or repair sewers.

Second, and what is more important, the WPA was known at the time both for its inefficiency (the word “boondoggle” was coined to describe it) and for the heavy-handed political influence brought to bear on its beneficiaries. To keep their jobs, many recipients of WPA largesse were required to contribute some of their wages to the Democratic Party or to campaign for local Democratic Party candidates.

Modern scholarship on the New Deal points to the conclusion that the policy initiatives of FDR’s administration prolonged the Great Depression and deepened its economic consequences far more so than if free-market forces had been allowed to run their course. America’s mayors and its president should pay heed to those lessons.

Government cannot “create” jobs except by taxing or borrowing from the private sector and, hence, destroying wealth and reducing employment opportunities there. If federal, state and local policy-makers do not soon wake up to that simple fact of economic life, the American experiment with liberty is at an end.

Tags: Economics, Employment, Government subsidies, Great Depression, Nationalization, Politics, Socialism, Urban Issues, Welfare

3 Comment(s)

  1. Great post! I’m writing from right here in the Workers’ Paradise that is Rochester. ;-)

    Speedmaster | Mar 9, 2010 | Reply

  2. It should be self evident that any job is there at the pleasure and for the benefit of the employer. It is not for the benefit of the employee although he benefits from the wages paid. These wages are part of the gross profit of the enterprise so if we make a profit evil we must also make wages evil.

    There is no way the government can take capital from the constituents, hire people in make-work jobs and increase our prosperity. That is all one and the same as lifting yourself by your own bootstraps.

    While there is a limit to how much a job is worth the best business practice will pay well for the work rendered. This has numerous benefits for all concerned.

    As touching the New Deal, we are still suffering under its bondage which has squandered our technological growth to the point of bankruptcy. Unless we can reject the entire concept and revert to our original system of individual enterprise we will be like Cuba and North Korea.
    Whit

    Richard L. Whitford | Mar 15, 2010 | Reply

  3. As anyone who has served in municipal government can attest, this article is not news. The “membership” bodies of groups such as U.S. Conference of Mayors, Municipal League, etc... are 95-100% represented by socialist doctrine. The meetings and newsletters are chock-full of “what can we get for ‘free’ from the tax-payers ‘over there’.”
    While serving as a Trustee in my town, I would argue against such policies and monies, and was universally viewed as not “caring” about my constituency. After all, the money is coming into the town for projects that would otherwise be paid for by the citizens of our town, and there for, I was chastised for not seeing ‘the obvious’ that this was “free money”, and that it was the fiscally responsible thing to do to lobby for some of that cash.
    I have long argued that the government is not as stupid as far too many of us assume. The government never walks in and starts taking, they walk in and start giving. The goal being to get everyone eating from the trough. Once they have us eating the slop, it’s much easier to pick our pockets. But I continue to argue – usually to deaf ears – that a dollar that goes to Washington (or your state capital), never comes back as a dollar, it comes back as a dime – if it comes back at all. Thus, to get “Free Money”, the key is to stop sending the dollars to Washington (or your state capital) in the first place. You can see by the current debt, just how many people have listened to me.

    joe4liberty | Mar 16, 2010 | Reply

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