He should've had those things be passed as Federal legislation; they're good things.
They were also quite un-Constitutional under the contemporary construction of the Commerce Clause.
Haha, are you serious? Pretty much all real economists say lack of regulation is what caused the Great Depression. And if it isn't lack of regulation, what is it?
Care to cite any of these real economists?
There's a reason no formal study on the effects of the lack of regulation on the Great Depression has ever been done: it's really just a set of buzz words told to the public of the 'Lies Told to the Children' sort.
The Great Depression was the result of a complicated complex of factors and it can't be entirely nailed down to one individual factor or related set of factors. The Great Depression itself wasn't even really one event, but a series of events that kept the US economy depressed for over a decade.
If you consider the Great Depression as the actual high level of unemployment, then it becomes a bit simpler. The collapse in employment is directly related to the collapse in aggregate demand from 1929 to 1933. The collapse in aggregate demand is, in turn, directly related to the collapse of the money supply over the same period, the so-called Great Contraction that saw the money supply fall by 33%. Continuing to trace events backwards, the Great Contraction was more or less caused by the collapse of the US banking industry over this period, an event that happened in three waves. The first wave of bank failures, happening in 1930, was directly caused by an act of Congress, specifically the Smoot-Hawley Act which jacked tariff rates and triggered a trade war where all our largest trade partners retaliated by jacking their own tariffs on American exports.
The Wall Street crash (which is, of course, a big part of the 'lack of regulation' story) in October 1929 presaged only a relatively minor recession, by comparison. After the Crash the stock market began a slow but steady recovery until the middle of 1930 when Smoot-Hawley was finally passed and investors saw the writing on the wall, immediately selling their holdings and getting out of Dodge. The crash itself, by the way, likely had a lot to do with Smoot-Hawley, as the tariff revision debate in the Senate was a major news story in the New York Times during late October when the decline began, and a major shift of several free trade progressives to support of the tariff act in return for tariffs on their own regional products occurred October 29th, the day we traditionally think of as the 'Wall Street Crash'.
The other banking panics had their own proximate causes, related to either absolutely abysmal monetary policy (in the middle of 1931 the Fed started
contracting the supply of Treasuries) or adverse events overseas (the failure of the Credit Institute in Austria in 1932).
A 'lack of regulation' really had little to do with it. The stock market in 1929, if it was overvalued at all (something that can actually be brought into contention), was only mildly overvalued, and
that had everything to do with the monetary policy mistakes of the middle and late 20's, rather than being the inevitable result of an unregulated financial system.
How about the
WW1 Adjusted Compensation Act? Or the lack of federal assistance during the Mississippi Flood of 1927?
To quote another past President: "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
As to the Adjusted Compensation Act, he did work out a deal by which the servicemen were compensated, he seems to simply have felt that it was of greater importance to ensure tax payers got to keep more of their hard earned money than to immediately pay cash in an effort to compensate servicemen for the wartime inflation rate.
That's not always a good thing.
Never said it was. Then again, I think you'd have a lot of trouble finding a sexually liberal President from this era.