Hehe... "my side"...

I really don't want Ryan to "take my side"... honestly. I just need him to understand where I am coming from. I really feel that the evidence supports what I am saying MORE than it supports what he is saying, but if he can show me that this isn't true, then perhaps "my side" is the wrong one.

I have admitted to being wrong in the past, as hard as that may be to believe.

What I find particularly frustrating about this specific topic is that someone (ahem) keeps changing the parameters of the debate. If I remember correctly, the debated started out with his statement that the New Deal failed utterly... then that it mostly failed... then that it was 51% failure over 49% success... and now we are down to opinion versus opinion, and no concrete determination can be made!

This irks me because history isn't an abstract science... at least not in the pure sense of the term. It is as dynamic and detail-ridden as any other topic of study you care to name, but in the end... it either IS or ISN'T, and in regards to a period of only the most recent past, an actual determination should be able to be made one way or the other even by the likes of us. Either the New Deal was GOOD for America, or it was BAD for America.

To put this in perspective for anyone that cares to read, let's use a similar argument that we had several years ago (this is an EXAMPLE... I am not starting this again!)...

Ryan contended that not only did the New Deal NOT solve any problems in the Great Depression, it made them worse to the point where the only thing that saved the US economy at all was WWII. His argument said that WWII was good for the US economy, while I said it wasn't... that NO war is good for an economy.

After hours, days and weeks of debate, the discussion boiled down to the point where we all agreed that what ended the "era" of the Great Depression was the MASSIVE deficit spending and TOTAL economic control by the Federal government in it's effort to win the war. This erased the last vestiges of unemployment, a falling and weak commodities market, rampant inflation/deflation cycles in the value of the dollar and weak consumer confidence by FORCING America to save money while at the same time providing the means for the biggest manufacturing BOOM the country had seen since the Industrial Revolution. With rationing, fixed commodity pricing, and 88% of the means of production geared totally to the war effort... the problem was fixed for us by (drum roll, please) government intervention on a scale hitherto unknown in the US... and not seen since, either. The MEANS we used to win WWII was what got us out of the "Great Depression" once and for all, but not the war itself.

The point I'm making is that history isn't "fuzzy"... if the facts are there, then solid determinations can be made: Did the New Deal, or even some part of it, help America recover from the depression-cycle that had begun in 1929?

I say YES, it did.