The Dust Bowl years were the closest we ever came to a Socialist nation. The elites all marveled at Stalin’s resolute governance and the happy campers in the USSR. Collectivizatio n of agriculture in Ukraine produced massive famine. Huge numbers of productive, working-age men were lost to the trenches of WW-l and the Spanish flu. A crippled man sat in the White House. Social Security was enacted. All of FDR’s spit balls did nothing to get us out of the Great Depression. It was the great gush of oil as the oil fields of East Texas and Oklahoma came on-stream.

It certainly feels like that right now.