Social Security has been plundered by the government from its inception. The problem is not the system, but those administering it. It should not be privatized, but restored to solvency and then not tinkered with. Constantly raising the age limit at which one collects is one of the most cowardly acts congress has enacted. Where does the money come from? The military, Bush tax cuts - lots of places.
I've been on an America trip last week, and spent the greater part of a rainy day in the wonderful Barnes&Nobles on New York's Union Square. This gave me about three hours to read through about half of this book.
Based on this incomplete reading of the text, I think the book is decent, but not great. There is a viable conservative case to be made against New Deal programs. In particular, a major problem appears to have been that we now know that the make-work projects worked only to the extent that they were deficit-financed, not tax-financed. But before World War II, the increased government spending was to a very high degree financed by tax increases. This lead to a situation where every dollar of stimulation through spending was bought for a dollar of further depressing through tax increases.
The book doesn't spend enough pages on the stimulative effects of some New Deal programs, so I wouldn't recommend it as a reference text on that era. But if you want to learn about the New Deal by reading a "Pro" book and a "Con" book, "FDR's folly" is a pretty good choice for the "Con" side. I would have appreciated a statistical annex with the standard key macroeconomic data though.
