Leadership Quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Economic laws” gets dragged down from the heavens and put on the floor with the hungry. Roosevelt is puncturing a convenient fiction: that markets operate like weather, regrettable but untouchable. In the early Depression years, that argument wasn’t abstract theory; it was a moral alibi for inaction. If suffering is “natural,” then relief is charity, not obligation. If it’s man-made, then the state can be held responsible for changing it.

The verb “prate” is doing sharp work. It’s not “argue” or “reason”; it’s empty chatter, a jab at economists, financiers, and politicians who hide behind technical language while bodies and breadlines pile up. Roosevelt frames their expertise as a kind of performative detachment, a way to sound sober while refusing to get their hands dirty with policy.

Then comes the pivot: “We must lay hold of the fact.” He’s not merely offering a counterpoint; he’s commanding a shift in reality-testing. The subtext is democratic and radical in the plainest sense: rules that govern wages, prices, credit, and employment are choices, and choices can be revised. By insisting these “laws” are “made by human beings,” Roosevelt is rewriting the political battlefield. Debates about relief, regulation, and public works stop being fights against “the way things are” and become fights over who gets to write the rules - and whose pain counts as evidence that the rules are failing.

It’s also a warning: if government won’t humanize the economy, desperation will.