Hoover and todays leaders

Anyone who has not read Kevin Baker’s article in the new Harper’s Magazine should go out and get it immediately. Mr. Baker makes a brilliant comparison between President Hoover and the new President of the United States. Baker shows much the two men have in common at a personal level in a way that is quite compelling. He then demonstrates that Hoover failed because he was too steeped in the economic paradigm in which he was brought up. While Hoover, quite contrary to public perception, made serious and innovate efforts to deal with an economic crisis that the majority of people didn’t even understand. But Hoover’s failure was rooted in his inability to step into a new paradigm, to find structurally new ways of dealing with what was happening. Baker then shows how Obama, despite his radical rhetoric, is making the exact same mistakes. Obama is simply unable of stepping into the new frontier of economic thought that he needs to in order to really deal with the problems he is facing. He is surrounding himself with small-minded party politicians who represent small constituencies and have no courage to make real changes. Instead of stepping into the realm of political conflict that he must in order to make changes, Obama is attempting to play a political game of cooperation and reconciliation that will lead into cosmetic changes in systems that require serious overall.

 

How similar are our political problems here in Canada! Ignatieff, is a man who has no serious vision for dealing with the problems we are facing. Harper has poisoned the political well of Canadian politics and corrupted the entire system with hate and ultra-partisanship. The Conservatives walked Canada right into this economic devastation by squandering surpluses on tax cuts that helped no one but the prosperous. They then tabled a budget which was just another joke. It promised lots of temporary spending, most of which will never go out to the people who need it, and more permanent tax cuts which mean nothing to average working-class and middle-class people. But the Liberals watched it happen and voted for it. Then Ignatieff made a lot of noise about holding the government to account on several important issues, but let the Harper government walk away without a single genuine concession, unless you call another committee of white men with suits real progress.

All that we have learned is that Ignatieff, even if he becomes Prime Minister, will fail because he has no genuine ideas. He is working within the same paradigm as Mr. Harper and thus he cannot step beyond the very politics that he claims to be opposing.

The depression of the 1930s almost brought capitalism to its knees and led in Europe and elsewhere to fascism. Capitalism saved itself by the actions of men like FDR who were willing to shift the paradigm away from the politics that had reigned since the previous depression in the 1870s. But in the present crisis it appears that no leaders are stepping out on the limb that must be traversed in order to shift modern politics and economics into a new era.

 

Harper, the new Hoover

Well, a growing number of economists are beginning to discredit Stephen Harper on the economic portfolio. The recent declines in the stock-markets will only begin to manifest themselves in the economy in a clear way through the winter and into the spring. But Harper has made it clear that, like many conservatives, he has forgotten the lessons taught to us by the great depression. Harper imagines the market, left to its own devices, will somehow solve the very problems that it created in the first place. Does this sound familiar to any of you? For years Herbert Hoover told the suffering and destitute of the United States in the 1930s that they just had to wait for the market to solve their problems. And while Hoover enjoyed the very best that life could offer, the destitute became evermore desperate. Well just today Mel Watkins, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Toronto, wrote that “Stephen Harper looks like Herbert Hoover who brought us the Great Depression.” Now to give Mr. Hoover, who has long passed from this world and is therefore not here to defend himself, a fair hearing, he was not as committed to laissez-faire ideology as is sometimes claimed; he did make certain legislative efforts to stop the crisis in the economy. However, Hoover, like Harper didn’t understand that the economy in such a deteriorating state requires intervention en masse to stop a downward spiral. But perhaps more importantly, no matter how bad things got for average people Hoover would never commit to any serious legislative relief for those suffering the ill-effects of the depression because he believed that it would create an atmosphere of dependence. This ideological claptrap continues to be shared by most conservatives and is a particularly strong among Harper and his old-boy’s network. Even if one believes this, which I don’t and I think it is demonstrably incorrect, surely it only applies under fairly ideal conditions. After all, when people are drowning and stranded after a flood, no one says ‘let those people caught in the flood’s path work it out for themselves, if we save them now they will just become dependent on that help.” We don’t say it because a basic level of human compassion requires that we are, at some very essential level, our brother’s and sister’s keeper. Hoover opposed legislative intervention because at some simple level he did not understand the basic lessons of Christian compassion. Harper suffers from the same disease. Christianity is in fact fundamentally inconsistent with real laissez-faire ideology for the simple reason that the economy is a product of ‘man’ not of God; we create it and work it; it does not happen by some sort of magic. If we save drowning people from a flood, commonly thought of as an act of God, why would we hesitate to save people from an economic disaster which is an act of ‘man.’ Harper is like Hoover because he doesn’t understand the very basic elements of Humanity and compassion. The coming crisis demands the same kind of intervention and compassion that Roosevelt practiced, otherwise in a few years from now tens of thousands of people will loose their houses, their livelihoods, and their happiness; and Harper will suffer the same kind of historical verdict with which Hoover has rightly been branded.

Harper and Hoover; two conservative peas in a pod.