Roosevelt fed the hysteria by claiming that he possessed a “secret map” showing Nazi plans to conquer South and Central America, as well as secret documents proving that Hitler planned to supplant all existing religions with a Nazi Church. Needless to say, those statements were further falsehoods.

That again from Ralph Raico’s Great Wars and Great Leaders.

Roosevelt, who always viewed any criticism of himself as a perversion of true democracy, was outraged. The President of the United States wrote a personal letter to a managing editor declaring that Flynn, “should be barred hereafter from the columns of any presentable daily paper, monthly magazine, or national quarterly.” Whether or not as a consequence of FDR’s spite, The New Republic dropped the column by Flynn it had been publishing since 1933, a sign things were changing in the circles of left-liberalism. In the years to come, FDR would use the FBI, the IRS, and other agencies to spy on, harass, and intimidate his critics. This – and his lying, his constant lying – more than any supposed mental affliction, explains the hatred so many harbored for Franklin Roosevelt.

Just imagine.

I just hate it when people fight for the old dead ideas. We need new ones. I am sure these folks will be on the scene to protest.

The job creation bill that President Obama sent to Congress earlier this month includes a provision that would allow unsuccessful job applicants to sue if they think a company of 15 more employees denied them a job because they were unemployed.

Do any of the actual economists in the White House get listened to? I can assure you that every single member of his economic team would tell him that such a proposal only has the possibility of reducing employment. Now, I can think of two reasons why the President would go ahead and float this idea then:

1. He understands economics full well, and knows that such a provision has no chance in hell in getting through the legislation. Therefore it is a costless attempt at politicking and satisfying his disaffected base.
2. He has become so enraged that his economic policies have not been working, and thinks, like FDR did, that businesses are not hiring just to spite him, that he forgets the economics he knows and wants to ram something like this down business’ throats.

I still go strongly with #1. I know folks want to think #2 is plausible, but I think that following up the desire to tax the rich more with a move like that would politically backfire – I think there are limits to how much “warfare” the median voter can stomach. Remember, the median voter is employed.

For interested readers, there are two reasons that this proposal is a problem, both pretty obvious.

1. Being unemployed is a signal about unobserved characteristics that help firms decide who is more productive. Banning the use of such information is asking firms to have less information about the quality of their job applicants. In any case, is it even possible to monitor and enforce such a policy? This is worse than banning colleges from using test scores to determine the quality of their applicant pool. In a pooling equilibrium then, absent the ability of firms to use this information, all workers may be worse off – with lower wages prevailing than would otherwise be the case. Now there is more to say on the long term implications – including the possibility that lower wages are needed right now, and this is one way to get them since the central bank does not want to accommodate as much as the fiscal authorities want it to. That’s a stretch of course.
2. Independent of the pooling possibility from (1) this act plain and simple raises the cost of interviewing and hiring workers. When the costs go up, then we get less. Firms are even less likely to hire in this environment than before, and given the need to expand output, it is much more attractive to employ a machine to do the trick, to outsource some of the work, or to ask the existing workforce to do more. Ask yourselves, if you were hiring people, how would YOU respond to an increased risk of a lawsuit?

And as usual, the President’s reaction to this? To just deny it. Because if a President denies something, then it must be true.

Obama said recently that discrimination against the unemployed makes “absolutely no sense,” especially because many people find themselves  out of work through no fault of their own

Sure buddy. I think I need to throw out my intermediate micro notes now. I want to publicly apologize to the 1,000 or so students I have had in that course, we owe you some money back.

HT to Alex R.

This organization (the influential Friends of Democracy) won the gushing plaudits of the ever-gushing Mrs. President. Egged on by Mrs. President, the FBI “began to tap the telephones and open the mail of vocal opponents of the Administration’s foreign policy and to monitor anti-intervention rallies. It instituted surveillance of several of the president’s prominent congressional critics, including … the White House and the Justice Department also leaked to sympathetic journalists information from FBI files that was thoight to be embarrassing to anti-interventionists.

Bush? Did I say President Bush. I’m sorry to have made such an error. Please forgive me. Of course the scoundrel I am talking about is the beloved FDR. That is from Ralph Raico’s “On the Brink of World War II.” More to come.