Obama and Roosevelt: Just Ask Joe the Plumber

Posted by Lorren on October 21, 2008

I’ve posted previously that our times share a lot of similarities between those of 1929.  But there is another potential way that we might be history repeating itself as well… Obama seems to go after those who question him, just as Franklin Roosevelt did.

“Joe the Plumber,” the guy who had been saving up his money to buy his own business, asked Barak Obama a simple question. If he works hard and buys a business, he is going to be punished under Obama’s new tax plan.

Well, never question someone with power and a Messiah complex, I guess the lesson goes. Even though nobody camped trailers outside of Bill Ayer’s house to dig up dirt on him, the news media camped outside the Plumber’s house. They tried to dig up all the dirt on him… how he doesn’t have a plumber’s license, his tax troubles, etc. Now poor Joe can’t get a job.

If Obama the candidate and his friends in the media treat your average Joe like this for asking a simple question, how will Obama the President act?

Roosevelt’s policies might give us some insight. A lot of people talk about how he got the country through the Great Depression, but many of his policies made things worse and prolonged the depression. Plus, he went after a lot of his critics.

Take the case of Sam Insull, for example. His brother Martin wrote negatively about Insull. Insull was an electric guy who was responsible for getting electricity to much of the Chicago area. He was prosecuted for losing a lot of money for his stockholders, even though he lost quite a bit as well. Being prosecuted certainly didn’t help.

Andrew Mellon was another case of Roosevelt prosecutions. Mellon paid his taxes legally, but Roosevelt changed the rules on everyone. Then he went to try to prosecute Mellon for those laws retroactively… Roosevelt prosecuted him for doing things that were legal when he did them.

Another famous Roosevelt prosecution was that of the Schechter brothers. They were Kosher chicken sellers in New York, probably regular guys like Joe the Plumber. They were taken to court for not charging enough for their chickens, violating the “straight killing rule” which limited customer choice (and made it so that it was impossible to choose what size of a chicken you wanted), and also working too many hours. They were found guilty in two courts, although the Supreme Court exonerated them upon appeal.

Hopefully we won’t end up with four to eight years of these sorts of policies.