Navigator, July/August, 2000

The Immoral Equivalences of Elian's Enemies. Have Americans lost the ability to distinguish between a life under freedom and a life under oppression? Patrick Stephens examines how the debate over sending Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba suggests that many have.

 The New Deal's War against Economic Recovery. The New Deal "was not just a matter of staving off hunger," wrote Arthur Schlesinger in The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of The New Deal. "It was a matter of seeing whether a representative democracy could conquer economic collapse." Schlesinger went on to say that, "The only hope lay in governmental leadership of a power and will which representative institutions seemed impotent to produce." This view tends to be typical of most New Deal historians who routinely rank Franklin Roosevelt as one of America's best presidents. Not least among his accomplishments, they say, was rescuing America from the depression done through massive government spending programs.

In this exclusive Navigator interview, historian Gary Dean Best discusses his book, Pride, Prejudice and Politics: Roosevelt versus Recovery, 1933-1938, in which he shatters the myths about Roosevelt's New Deal. Then he replaces them with an objective view of its economic consequences. Best, a professor of history at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, has written numerous works on interwar America. Currently, he is working on a book tentatively entitled When Liberalism Took a Left, which examines the changes that took place in American liberalism during the New Deal years.

The Embattled Life of Moreau de Maupertuis. Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was among the eighteenth century's most multi-faceted scientists. Navigator editor Roger Donway examines many of Maupertuis's accomplishments, including his efforts in proving Newton's theory of the shape of the Earth, his famous "principle of least action," and his pioneering work in genetics. Despite these accomplishments, though, Maupertuis's life was made insupportable by accusations of plagiarism and other assaults on his character made by Voltaire and others.

What is Morality Good For? Will Wilkinson, a graduate student in philosophy, appraises Tara Smith's Viable Values (available from The Objectivism Store). In this book, Smith sets forth an exposition of Ayn Rand's metaethical theory and attempts to defend it against competing views. Wilkinson notes that though Smith is clear and convincing in her first task, her defense of Rand is lacking.

Markets or Morals? Navigator continues its debate over the compatibility between the market process as painted by economists such as Ludwig von Mises and George Reisman and the actions of principled men such as Howard Roark."