Redstate

One wonders if he conducted himself as Commander in Chief in the same manner.

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Gone 2500 years, still not PC.

political machinations, aided by no limitation on ethics. Apart from that he was an unlettered boob with a fatal attraction to the hard left. Even before Yalta Stalin handled him like a baby. A man before his time he cluttered his administration with the forerunners of today's no limits radicals, albeit there's no Soviet Union for them to constantly make excuses for. The shame of it!

The economy and unemployment figures in the run up to the war were miserable, contrary to legend. Then as now the results didn't matter, only power and ideology.

"a man's admiration for absolute government is proportinate to the contempt he feels for those around him". Tocqueville

In the event, he devalued the dollar not by 21 cents, but by closer to 40%. The official price went from $20.67 (where it had stood since early in the 19th century, with interruptions for the Civil War and its aftermath) to $35.

I've often wondered how the FDR brain trust happened to pick that number, but I now see that 35 is seven times five, so it makes some sense.

FDR most certainly overshot. For proof, look at the behavior of France, which in a historical context has the world's most consistently sophisticated central banking. (Yes, even better than the Bank of England.)

France overbought gold continuously from the US Treasury in the period from the late Twenties till the 1934 devaluation. Almost immediately, gold started flowing back into the US Treasury from France and elsewhere, indicating a strong dollar undervaluation. Except for the interruption of the Second world war, this gold inflow to the US continued until about 1960. That's how long it took for the US economy to grow into the value of the dollar that FDR had artificially undervalued.

Of course, the gold started to flow outward again in 1960 or so, until by 1971 we barely had an ounce left.

It's well worth noting that most of the rest of the world had abandoned the deeply-flawed interwar gold standard by 1930, and were thus spared the deep real-world Depression that we didn't start climbing out of until spring of 1933. Will is probably right when he talks about spooked investors prolonging the Depression, but he'd be more accurate to refer to the bankers who avoided lending money to businesses and lent money to the Federal government instead.

Will calls 1937 a "depression within a depression." It was actually a cyclical recession (albeit a very sharp one), not a monetary phenomenon.

that the free market can and will work best if left alone.

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It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
--Aristotle