#3. “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics. Out of the collapse of a prosperity whose builders boasted their practicality has come the conviction that in the long run economic morality pays. We are beginning to wipe out the line that divides the practical from the ideal; and in so doing we are fashioning an instrument of unimagined power for the establishment of a morally better world.” FDR’s Second Inaugural Speech, 1937
FDR clearly didn’t understand economics. Adam Smith summed up the economics of self interest perfectly when he explained that it’s not from the benevolence of the butcher that we get our meals, but in regards to his own self-interest. FDR sounds like President Obama, or Rick Santorum here, championing some sort of middle-class economics that have no basis in reality. And even scarier are FDR’s admissions here that he is fashioning an “instrument of unimagined power” for a “morally better world.” Remember in Aladdin when Jafar finally became a genie? FDR sounds a bit like that here.
Still, he must have believed that he would be a benevolent dictator. Nobel prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek once wrote that FDR was “Fully convinced that he knew best what was needed, Franklin D. Roosevelt conceived it as the function of democracy in times of crisis to give unlimited powers to the man it trusted, even if it meant that it thereby ‘forged new instruments of power which in some hands would be dangerous.'”
