Dennis Prager is calling out the conventional wisdom that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies helped end the Great Depression. The syndicated radio talker’s latest Prager University online course explains why.
Prager University recruited Lee Ohanian, Professor of Economics at UCLA, to debunk that false reality in roughly five minutes or less, the time frame granted to all Prager University courses. Did FDR End or Extend the Great Depression, available now, details why President Roosevelt thought his New Deal machinations would lift the country out of its economic stupor. It’s followed by a dash of cold, hard realities regarding how capitalism works.
“It’s all mythology about FDR,” says Prager, who blames left-leaning historians for mucking up reality.
“Who writes our history? It’s written by the left … everything is written by the left. They believe that the expansion of government is the greatest moral good,” he says. “The question is, is it true?”
A quick glance at history may seem to bolster the left’s argument.
“We emerged from the Great Depression and became the great economic power that we did after World War II,” Prager says.
Ohanian argues the New Deal, upon closer inspection, actually made matters worse. The president’s National Industrial Recovery Act circa 1933 artificially raised both prices and wages. That sounds great–on one-sided paper. Ohanian says labor costs went up as a result, and businesses stopped hiring workers.
He adds Roosevelt looked to World War I as a template for economic recovery, but the “inflated war demands” didn’t exist during the mid-30s.
Roosevelt himself would begrudgingly admit the error of his ways, the new course explains, Ohanian adds.
Prager contends such economic principles aren’t exactly what progressives look at for a successful result.
“The Left is not interested in prosperity but equality … does the left take responsibility for the fact that the Euro is in crisis?” he asks.
Prager says conservatives still aren’t making a persuasive argument against big government woes, especially in the Age of Obama. That makes Prager University’s course all the more relevant, particularly as young college students continue to get indoctrinated against core conservative principles.
“[The online courses are] my way of getting the greatest thinkers to undue the damage of the university,” Prager says.
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