Did Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal Really Save America?

Free Thoughts
E74 -

Jim Powell joins us for a discussion on the New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Did the New Deal really pull America out of the Great Depression?

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Hosts
Trevor Burrus
Research Fellow, Constitutional Studies
Aaron Ross Powell
Director and Editor
Guests
Jim Powell

Jim Powell, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is an expert in the history of liberty. He has lectured in England, Germany, Japan, Argentina, and Brazil as well as at Harvard, Stanford, and other universities across the United States. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Audacity/​American Heritage, and other publications.

He is the author of several books, including The Triumph of Liberty: A 2,000-Year History Told through the Lives of Freedom’s Greatest Champions (Free Press, 2000), with a foreword by Paul Johnson. This book chronicles heroic struggles against tyranny, slavery, war, and mass murder. Powell’s book FDR’s Folly, How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (2003) reported a wide range of findings—ignored by political historians and biographers—about the unexpected consequences of New Deal policies.

Did FDR’s New Deal policies help pull America out of the Great Depression, or were they in fact responsible for the high unemployment in the country until the beginning of World War II? Jim Powell joins us for a discussion on America’s great 20th century experiment with big government.

Is the picture we have of the New Deal Era accurate? What was the state of the country leading up to the New Deal? Were these new social programs successful in their goals-​-​and what were their goals in the first place? What are the lessons America learned from the New Deal? Which New Deal programs are still around today?

Show Notes and Further Reading

Jim Powell, FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (book)