The Corean Chronicles
The Golden Age... and Camelot
There's always been this human feeling that sometime, somewhere in the past, was a golden era, from which we as humans have fallen. For the ancient Greeks, it was the Golden Age, for devout Christians, the Garden of Eden. For those of English heritage, it was Camelot, and for at least some Americans, it was the American Camelot of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The problem, of course, is that none of them existed as envisioned by their believers. Early Greek history was blood-soaked, with life brutal and short, and that was if you were male and free. Even under the original terms of the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve had to be unperceptive and not-too-bright, because they weren't allowed a full range of knowledge, and if the archeologists are correct, the original garden was located in an area near the
Today, politically, Barrack Obama is appealing to that yearning for change, and those who long for Camelot and the Golden Ages that never were are flocking to him, his incredibly well-spoken words, and his visions. While that yearning for a golden and simpler time is certainly understandable, and an eternal human wish, wishing for and following such a spellbinding orator is nothing more than another manifestation of the human desire for a better life paid for by someone else. This isn't to say that such desires aren't powerful and that they can't change things. They do... and seldom for the better.
Hitler promised dreams of a better life, and so did Mussolini, and so did Huey Long in
Me... I'm much more impressed by an imperfect Winston Churchill's promise of only "blood, sweat, and tears," because that's how the world is improved, not by harkening to times that never were and suggesting that they can be achieved just by "wishing" for change or voting for or supporting a particular man or woman on a white horse.
All too often those dreams of a Golden Age have only presaged a lifetime of nightmares.
As far as I can tell, FDR was a very good orator. Imho, he also accomplished a great deal, both for people at large and for the functioning of markets, companies, and the government -- cf. the SEC and the Fed/bank regulations. As Lester Thurow points out in a recent book on challenges to capitalism, in the 1930s very few countries were committing to capitalism as opposed to fascism and communism; by the 1990s, capitalism was attractive to most societies throughout the world, partly because of its effectiveness once folks like FDR regulated it better.
With regard to Winston Churchill, as far as I can determine, once WWII was over the British people voted him out of office shortly thereafter. The key problem, as I understand it, was not his promise of "blood, sweat, and tears" but that he opposed the redistributive policies of upcoming Labor governments. These policies, it turned out, were pretty successful at creating prosperity and decreasing poverty without vitiating capitalism. For a recent reprise, see Paul Krugman's blog and the effects of Tony Blair on British poverty post-Margaret Thatcher (decreased in 1/2, from 26% to 14%).
As for JFK, I would agree with your comments as far as they went, but as someone who was about 13 when he was assassinated, I was keenly interested in the JFK policies. Iirc, most if not all of these were blocked in Congress by a coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats. Much of what Lyndon Johnson managed to pass subsequent to the assassination was based on JFK's ideas, and driven by the cabinet that LBJ inherited from JFK. I grant that LBJ was extraordinary in his ability to get legislation passed (cf. the reminiscences in Russell Baker's autobiography), but I doubt that we would want to lose some of the civil rights we gained then (full disclosure: my Dad was on JFK's Commission for the Status of Women).
Finally, I definitely agree that we want to be wary of someone who promises something for nothing, or something to be taken from someone else. However, I think we need to distinguish between something for nothing, and support that alleviates disabilities, allowing people to fully contribute. For example, I am the father of an autistic son. I estimate that me and my wife bearing most of the costs of bringing up that son has cost society about $150,000 a year, which could have been more had there been no support. My wife was a corporate lawyer before having to leave her job to devote herself to handling my son -- thus society lost that work; and I had to severely constrain the jobs I took in the computer industry in order to be available for support; again, a loss of productivity to society. I would estimate that $50,000 more in child care support, effectively provided (and no, I see no prospect that the market would have supplied this adequately) would have allowed us both to continue working as productively as possible. Things like universal health care and reductions in poverty, whatever the merits of particular proposals, often are seen as "getting something free from someone else" when the typical case is more like mine: the elimination of a handicap that pays off over time, not necessarily for the individual him or herself (my son will never earn more than token wages), but for all those in society that would otherwise have to accommodate the handicap. I would also cite Jeffrey Sachs' The End of Poverty and Robert Shiller's book on creative uses of insurance markets for interesting new ideas in this regard.
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