New Deal

The New Deal was the name President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave to the series of programs between 1933–1937 with the goal of relief, recovery and reform of the United States economy during the Great Depression.

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• I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt, accepting the Democratic nomination for President - July 2, 1932.

• Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal. It was Mussolini's success in Italy, with his government-directed economy, that led the early New Dealers to say "But Mussolini keeps the trains running on time."
  • Ronald Reagan in May 17, 1976 Time Magazine.

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• The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive 'policies' and 'Plans' of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word 'socialism', but what else can one call it?
  • H.G. Wells

• My decision on this matter is as certain and final as death and the staggering New Deal taxes.
  • Thomas E. Dewey

• Instead of the administration being so eager to dismantle the New Deal, we should be working together to offer the American people a New New Deal.
  • Ron Kind

• There is some evidence that some New Deal programs in some of the states discriminated against blacks. But I have been sort of - I've been impressed overall with the relatively fair treatment that blacks received during the New Deal.
  • William Julius Wilson

• We need to strengthen and save Social Security for today's workers. If we don't act now, this system, born out of the New Deal, will become a bad deal.
  • Mitch McConnell

• In Washington, DC, Democrats still stuck in the New Deal are reflexively searching for national solutions to local problems. We Republicans, having found ourselves in charge, have decided it is more blessed to impose our views rather than to liberate America from Washington's views.
  • Lamar Alexander

• Every element in the New Deal program: central planning, creation of a network of compulsory cartels for industry and agriculture, inflation and credit expansion, artificial raising of wage rates and promotion of unions within the overall monopoly structure, government regulation and ownership, all this had been anticipated and adumbrated during the previous two decades. And this program, with its privileging of various big business interests at the top of the collectivist heap, was in no sense reminiscent of socialism or leftism; there was nothing smacking of the egalitarian or the proletarian here. No, the kinship of this burgeoning collectivism was not at all with socialism-communism but with fascism, or socialism-of-the-right, a kinship which many big businessmen of the twenties expressed openly in their yearning for abandonment of a quasi-laissez-faire system for a collectivism which they could control....Both left and right have been persistently misled by the notion that intervention by the government is ipso facto leftish and antibusiness.
  • Murray Rothbard