MAILBAG:

Joseph Bell claims that Republicans are merely being “obstructionist” in their desire to reduce, rather than increase, taxes (“Partisan politics hinder progress,” Feb. 26).

But what if they firmly believe reducing taxes and spending rather than raising them, as Obama wants to do, is best for the economy?

Bell paints President Herbert Hoover as an ardent capitalist, yet as The Wall Street Journal pointed out not long ago, he was rather “an ardent believer in government intervention to support incomes and employment.”

Hoover undertook public works projects such as Hoover Dam, signed the trade-killing Smoot-Hawley tariff, and presided over the greatest expansion of government spending from 1929 to 1932 ever recorded in peacetime history.

Some capitalist.

Bell speaks of the Great Depression as “a long and difficult period.”

It was long and difficult because President Franklin Roosevelt made it so with his misguided policies of raising taxes and regulating the economy.

From 1932 to 1940 unemployment in this country never dropped below 15%, and the GDP didn’t recover from 1929 levels until the mid-1950s.

Roosevelt eventually got us out of the Depression and reduced unemployment by involving us in World War II and drafting 3.5 million young men to fight said war.

President Obama is taking us down the same road as Roosevelt did. Been there, done that.

The majority of people supported Roosevelt then; the majority supports Obama now. But government intervention didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.

Bell should know this.

DAVID PEARSE

Costa Mesa

Freedoms in America aren’t ubiquitous

As you may know, the U.S. was not an original signatory to the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights because of its inherent restrictions of freedom.

Without knowing our current status in this regard, I can hardly believe that we would encourage the application of the declaration without major amendments to its original clauses, which stated that the basic freedoms we know here in America, and are guaranteed by our own Constitution, are valid only within the laws of the countries that are signatory to it.

Thus, freedom of speech in Russia is only applicable under the domestic laws of Russia and has nothing to do with the inalienable rights of men.

Why anyone would promote this obviously flawed instrument is beyond my American comprehension.

BILL HODGES

Costa Mesa