Bad deal
Dr Daniel Scroop (Platform, 4 March) is correct that we can learn a number of lessons from former American president Franklin D Roosevelt and those lessons involve telling us exactly what not to do. Roosevelt’s New Deal was simply the continuation of previous president Herbert Hoover’s interventionist programmes that turned what should have been a brief recession into a full-blown depression.
Roosevelt raised taxes, recklessly spent taxpayers’ money, inflated the currency and hugely expanded the size of government to unprecedented levels and succeeded only in strangling the economy for many years.
These are certainly indisputable political achievements and what is needed is not to replicate these policies but to reject them outright while reducing the size of government and the burden of taxation.
Bruce Crichton
Victoria Road