Suffer, Some Say

Well, there is just nothing we can do about it.  The beast will always have its way with us.  Try to survive the feasting, it will get its fill and go away.  So we are told.

Some people really do believe we are hopeless victims of inevitable pain and suffering.  They are fatalists.  When problems arise, they are quick to want to shirk their responsibility, to lighten the load, and to lay their own human inheritance down on the side of the road until the troubles run their course.  These folks really do not deserve the gifts wrapped up in their own creation, however you may conjure the origin of our species and every individual member of it.  Ironically, these tend to be the same hands-in-the-air people who love to invent stories about creation and try like hell to impose them on the rest of us in one form or another.

They also invent stories about the recent past to mislead us about current times and divert us from doing what we should to make things better.  David Brooks is one of these people, and he is doing it again today in the Picayune.  Brooks says, "Democrats are besotted by the myth that the New Deal ended the Great Depression."  No, Mr. Brooks, we are burdened with the responsibility to actively address problems, we are not disposed to lay our brains on the side of the road and throw our hands in the air when times get hard. 

There is no disputing the fact that the New Deal had by 1937 rescued a collapsed economy from its death throes. A brief relapse occurred when FDR was pressured to abandon the expansionary New Deal policies in favor of the poisonous contractionary prescriptions which are in vogue again today.  Soon enough, WWII brought about a resurgence of expansionary government spending, which finally put the Depression at an end. 

The war effort in essence was the New Deal on steroids. It necessitated government spending on a scale never seen before.  It was all used not for productive investment, but to hire people to build things other people were then employed to use in order to burn and blow up more things.  And it still worked to resurrect a moribund economy.