By Jean Hodgkinson

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions -Martin Luther King, Jr.

In 1932, FDR was elected American president for the first time (of four). The Great Depression had begun in 1929 meaning Roosevelt took office at the worst of times, but his election promise had been simple.

“Throughout the nation men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy of the government, look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth,” he said. “I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people.”

Yet what most people fail to understand (or admit) about the New Deal is that it wasn’t intended to be a radical measure, a fundamental restructuring of history’s greatest experiment in capitalism: it was designed to save American capitalism (which it did). President John F. Kennedy knew intimately the fear gripping rich businessmen and their politician friends during the civil unrest unleashed by the widespread poverty of the Great Depression. “In those days,” said JFK’s father Joseph, “I felt and said I would be willing to part with half of what I had if I could be sure of keeping, under law and order, the other half.” The New Deal was Ancient Rome’s revolt-prevention program all over again, bribing the poor with free bread, pacifying brutes with gladiatorial circuses.

Roosevelt chose Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labour and she presented a wide range of policy options for soothing the masses: “a 40-hour workweek, minimum wage, workman’s compensation, unemployment compensation, a federal law banning child labour, direct federal aid for unemployment relief, Social Security, a revitalized public employment service, health insurance.” Most of these were implemented along with the Wagner Act, a law favourable to the unions. People were put to work (at government expense) on all kinds of useless things (like infrastructure repair). Even artists, writers, actors and musicians were paid to entertain the public and embellish municipal spaces.

But those heady days are a thing of the distant past and judging by the rhetoric of GOP contestants vying to oppose Obama in the 2012 presidential election, that’s exactly where these sorts of government-led improvement programs will remain. (European and Canadian politicians are singing the same tune.) One of the New Deal’s more ambitious art projects, for example, installed murals and statues in post offices and courthouses across the U.S. But in March 2011, Maine’s Republican governor “ordered a mural at the [state’s] Department of Labor taken down on the grounds that the image is biased against business owners.” His press secretary explained the “mural is awaiting relocation to a more appropriate venue,” which she called being “focused on the job at hand.”

Then there’s the “austerity measures,” a cliché being thrown around as if some magical solution has been discovered. But these spending cuts which governments claim must absolutely be implemented are actually crippling the economic system they want to preserve. Consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the U.S. economy (and the U.S. consumer accounts for 70 percent of the Canadian economy) yet the proposed solution is to throw thousands of government employees into the swelling ranks of the unemployed (thereby depriving the U.S. economy of $37 billion in consumer spending) while at the same time reducing benefits to the (now more numerous) unemployed. The Canadian government pays an outside consultant $90,000 a day for advice on how to save money, seemingly oblivious to the dysfunctional cost/benefit analysis of such an arrangement.

Gene Cranick, however, is without a doubt the best human canary in this capitalist coalmine. In autumn 2010 he’d forgotten to pay the $75 subscription fee for fire protection services, so when his rural Tennessee house caught fire “firefighters came out to the scene and just stood there.” (They’d come to protect the house of a neighbour whose account was paid in full.) “In the early years cities like Boston and New York had small, privately operated fire brigades,” Joshua Holland wrote at the time of Cranick’s homestead martyrdom. “It was utterly disastrous. That’s why in the modern world, if a massive fire breaks out, fire companies from across a municipality can respond together, specifically because they’re not in competition. Limited government sounds good as an abstraction,” Holland concluded, “but the principles of the free market won’t get you too far when your house is on fire.”

In short, “All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another,” as Dr King once observed. “Everything we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.”