Franklin D Roosevelt
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Published in March 1933 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was first inaugurated, the classic New York Times bestseller Looking Forward delivers F.D.R.'s honest appraisal of the events that contributed to the Great Depression and mirror our own situation today. With blunt, unflinching, and clear prose Roosevelt attacks head-on the failure of the banking system and the U.S. government and sets forth his reasoning and hope for the major reforms of his New Deal.
Compiled from F.D.R.'s articles and speeches, Looking Forward includes chapters such as "Reappraisal of Values," "Need for Economic Planning," "Reorganization of Government," "Expenditure and Taxation," "The Power Issue," "Banking and Speculation," and "National and International Unity" in which Roosevelt argues for the reassessments and reforms that are needed again in American society and throughout the world today.
An inspiring beacon from the past, Looking Forward sheds critical light on today's turbulent world.
and one-half times. In another case, that of a rural, agricultural county, local taxes amounted to $158,000 in 1900 and to $1,150,000 in 1929. In this case taxes were multiplied seven times, tax valuations slightly more than twice, while the population of the county actually decreased five percent. In the suburban county per capita local taxes in 1900 were $6 and in the rural county $4.30, but in 1929 they were $90 and $52. Later I shall discuss taxation and the financing of governmental units.
families.” These people, he considered, had two sets of rights, those of “personal competency” and those involved in acquiring and possessing property. By “personal competency” he meant the right of free thinking, freedom of forming and expressing opinions and freedom of personal living, each man according to his own lights. To ensure the first set of rights a government must so order its functions as not to interfere with the individual. But even Jefferson realized that the exercise of the
did not realize that there had been borrowings and lendings, an interchange of assets, of liabilities and of capital between the component parts of the whole. They did not realize that all these conditions necessitated terrific overcharges for service by these corporations. The Insull failure has opened our eyes. It shows us that the development of these financial monstrosities was such as to compel ultimate ruin; that practices had been indulged in that suggest the old days of railway
enacting legislation for the relief of agriculture, the Congress was called into special session. The disastrous fruit of that session was the notorious and indefensible Grundy-Smoot-Hawley Tariff. The net result was a barbed-wire entanglement against our economic contacts with the world at large. As to the much-heralded purpose of that special session, the result was a ghastly jest. This was so for several reasons: the principal cash crops of our farms are produced much in excess of our
beyond individual ownership, it was not long before management became a game by which controlling interests were used as pawns. This was the logical result of the corporation method of doing business, but it added a complication which easily lent itself to the predatory designs of the unscrupulous. Businesses eventually became pawns themselves in dreams of financial empires where small stockholders no longer had any voice; it was forgotten that one individual with ten shares had as much right to