Sometimes the best lessons take years to learn

I am here now to freely and openly admit that I am slow.

To be more precise - retarded.

Just today I came to fully realize that two very long held, personal beliefs-which, by the way are very much against the grain of all that my government schooling tried to infuse in me-were not only related they were each the cause of the other.

You see, from all I can recall about my "schooling", the Great Depression was ended by the great plan of the great man FDR. Without his vision and strength we would not have had the New Deal, and the Great Depression would have been even greater.

Add to that the fact that without a full and unconditional surrender of the Axis forces in WWII the world would forever be in fear of a resurgent evil, or worse, we would lose a million men in the invasion of Japan.

Before I continue, let me explain that while these were explicitly taught in the textbooks of my school age youth, I was fortunate enough to have teachers that believed in and worked very hard to be educators.

Thank you to all of the teachers that taught me how to think, not what to think. Especially Mr. Trager and Mr. Williams.

Those two men especially taught me to think about the lessons of history. How did massive government spending rebuild an economy ? How was an extended and aggressively anti-civilian offensive better than a negotiated peace with a new group of men that were of a mind that their warlords were very wrong and either were replaced or need to be ?

For years I felt alone in those thoughts. Until recently, when there have been more and more references to how it was WWII that brought about the end of the Great Depression. But that alone did not trigger the connection.

Then came my interest in Economics Austrian School style.(A great resource site for when you are serious about economics) .
At first just the occasional article, mostly Vox Day's column at WorldNetDaily. Then daily reading of Vox Popoli.

That is where it really peaked. I re-read Vox's two short, succinct columns(1st here 2nd here) on the current screwing up of economic policy(stupidly doing something-anything) at WND. There it was.

So very obvious, now.

The New Deal was failing miserably. FDR saw war in Europe and in the Pacific as a means of getting men to work, or more precisely, off the unemployment rolls. Not as a sole objective, mind you, but as a great side-effect.

However, that too would not be enough. Those men would need jobs when the war ended. Jobs in industry. Jobs producing goods. But, there has to be a way to insure that there is a shortage of goods elsewhere so that the US economy will get rolling first. Here is where FDR was decidedly an America Firster.

Ah ha ! He had to convince the Allied Forces to agree to, and follow through on, only accepting an Unconditional Surrender. The USSR would go along gratefully, they were all about conquest and domination - remember that non-aggression pact just before carving up Poland ?
The Brits and the French would be easy to convince. They were still pissed off about the bombing of London and the occupation of Paris. Plus they were still living in 1918 wanting to humiliate the Germans.

Now it all comes together. To achieve an unconditional surrender they would have to bomb Germany and Japan back into the stone-age. Think Dresden and Hamburg. Think Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Think with no industrial competition from Europe or Asia, the US will be able to send a lot of goods to the rest of the world.

The end of the Great Depression was a direct result of the inhuman and criminal assault on civilian populations in order to continue the terrible government overstepping, and dreadful economic policies implemented by FDR and the Congresses that were bowing to the bad planning his administration was responsible for.

No wonder the government schools were pushing hard for what I read in those textbooks. The truth is ugly.

Thank you so much Vox I include you among my better teachers.