What are the Real Consequences of FDR? (Part II)

Asked, a while ago, What are the real consequences of FDR? 

I pointed to an article by Amity Shales in the Wall Street Journal subtitled “Reconsidering our reverence for FDR.”

I suspect that that particular article in the Journal  started a small avalanche.  Because now we find by way of Captain Ed, George Will noting that the culture of entitlements started with the FBI are as well.  Says Ed:

George Will reminds us of when we began moving towards federal bankruptcy, and why, in today’s column about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Long admired as the man who saved America from economic disaster and potential revolution, FDR also begat the large-scale government spending programs that failed to reolve the economic crisis, but instead set us on the path for another:

In 1937, during the depression within the Depression, there occurred the steepest drop in industrial production ever recorded. By January 1938 the unemployment rate was back up to 17.4 percent. The war, not the New Deal, defeated the Depression. Franklin Roosevelt’s success was in altering the practice of American politics.This transformation was actually assisted by the misguided policies — including government-created uncertainties that paralyzed investors — that prolonged the Depression. This seemed to validate the notion that the crisis was permanent, so government must be forever hyperactive.

In his second inaugural address, Roosevelt sought “unimagined power” to enforce the “proper subordination” of private power to public power. He got it, and the fact that the federal government he created now seems utterly unexceptional suggests a need for what Amity Shlaes does in a new book. She takes thorough exception to the government he created.

Republicans had long practiced limited interest-group politics on behalf of business with tariffs, gifts of land to railroads and other corporate welfare. Roosevelt, however, made interest-group politics systematic and routine. New Deal policies were calculated to create many constituencies — labor, retirees, farmers, union members — to be dependent on government.

Will’s prinary point isn’t to discredit FDR, a president faced with an unprecedented catastrophe when elected to office, but to explore the failures of government imposition of scarcity. In the Depression, everything became scarce — goods, food, even work itself. Rather than attempt to bolster capital investment in the economy, FDR decided instead to assume federal control of the economy and ration on the basis of scarcity.

In taking that approach, FDR deliberately grew the federal government into a huge bureaucracy in order to control the economy down to the smallest level.

I must say, I have a great deal of difficulty with that assertion.  Certainly, if you are deliberately grew the Federal government into a huge bureaucracy, but to suggest that there was anything benevolent about it, in this case controlling the economy down to the smallest level, is not the purpose for which FDR did this.  Rather, it was the advance of socialism.  For its own sake.  That effort, socialism for its own sake, was successful at least in terms of establishing socialism here in the west:

Ever since, we have struggled with the legacy of the overmighty federal government. FDR’s radical approach to economic disaster, which ultimately failed, remains a millstone on our economy and our liberties. It’s time to rethink the FDR approach and return to a streamlined and properly scaled federal government.

What saved us?  Private sector initiatives, incidental to WWII.

Now, for an extra ten points,  who is the preeminent icon in the Democratic party of today?